We have various conversations going on around demographic data. I think we may have to look at a modification to the RM that would support a need that @ian.mcnicoll and @heather.leslie have long been asking for (and it’s in a thread here that I can’t put my finger on right now).
So, to put it in context, there are two potential types of demographic ‘reference’.
- One is what we support, which is references (via
PARTICIPATION, inENTRY.other_participations,COMPOSITION.participations, and in all the fixed attributes likeENTRY.subject,COMPOSITION.composeretc) - the other is when future involvement of some parties (normally clinicians, but could be someone else) is specified. We have this in Task Planning (
TASK_PARTICIPATION), but of course that’s outside the openEHR RM.
@ian.mcnicoll has mentioned various times in the past that he would like a way to make Participation a data type, so that it could be included in data that is about things in the future. I don’t think making it a data type is a good idea from a formal point of view (it will create issues in software), but the intention is right, and I think we will need to do something about it. The simplest way I can see is to add a new kind of ELEMENT (call it PARTICIPATION_ELEMENT for now) to the data structures part of the RM.
Doing this would allow PARTICIPATION_ELEMENT to be freely mixed in anywhere you can currently put ELEMENTs. I don’t see null flavour as being needed, because this kind of data is always prospective (i.e. a priori), not collected a posteriori.
Thoughts? If anyone can find the previous discussion about ‘participations as data types’ that would be useful too.