There is a lively discussion ongoing in the clinical community around requirments fo scales, which the recent changes on relaxing the unique value raule and introduction of DV_SCALE largely resolve.
There are 3 other requirements that have emerged…
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‘Description’ on an internal term linked to a DV_SCALE should be optional. This is universally agreed and makes a lot of sense. Quite often, especially with scores and scales, the term Description is redundant and just adds an overhead of authoring and translation. My understanding is that this is a feature of AOM/ADL rather than DV_SCALE per-se. THe preference would be to realx the mandation for DV_SCALE only but if this was not possible, to relax universally and enforce Description to be added in tooling for DV_CODED_TEXT, and absolutely for node names.
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There is on-going debate about some scales which for some values, do not have corresponding text term. I am much less keen on allowing term text value to be optional, even for just DV_SCALE/DV_ORDINAL if that were possible. I’d be happy to allow a space character to be used, if that was really felt to be the safest option.
- Also a suggestion that some scales do not even have a numeric value for every option and perhaps that should be optional also - I’m even more dubious about this. The only example I have seen to date is a Borg scale that has 1 to 10 then infinity - Its nuts/junk but …
Actually if we just paid a hitman to take out Dr Borg, that might save us all a lot of pain ( 9 on a scale of 0 to infinity).
I guess me key question here is whether any of these suggestions impact on the current planned release. I do think Description (1…1) should be relaxed generally, and left to good practice/tooling.