In modelling cases, particularly where we’re modelling scores and scales, the description element of text or ordinal values are unnecessary, because the value defined in the score only contain a single string of text. A good example of this is the ECOG Performance Status archetype, where editors (both Ocean’s AE and Marand’s AD) add a ‘*’ in the empty description element, like this:
[“at0005”] = <
text = <“Fully active, able to carry on all pre-disease performance without restriction.”>
description = <“*”>
Is the description element mandatory, since the editors both do this? Could we, in cases where we don’t need it, leave out the description altogether?
Kind regards, Silje Ljosland Bakke
Information Architect, RN
Coordinator, National Editorial Board for Archetypes
Nasjonal IKT HF, Norway
Normally the ‘text’ field should be used for something short and meaningful, with the ‘description’ field containing the longer version. However, here I think you are talking about the term definitions of DV_ORDINALs, and I guess the idea is that you want to put all the text into the ‘text’ field, since it is a more or less formal definition.
In such cases, since the ‘description’ field should exist, it can just be empty, i.e.
description = <“”>
Practically speaking, the current tools are probably doing nearly the right thing, but it would be better if there were no ‘*’.
In LinkEHR we used to put a default description including the rm type, but a couple of years ago we decided that it was better to just put an empty string.