Should treatment be subclass of health care process?

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Looks like it to me. Ditto:
-clinical history taking
-convalescence
-diagnostic process
-history
-laboratory test
-physical examination
-prophylaxis
-treatment

Original issue reported on code.google.com by alanruttenberg@gmail.com on 21 Dec 2014 at 4:32

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Related to this I propose that health care encounter be completely defined as 
any process that is both the realization of a health care provider role and a 
patient role. This is in order to allow for, e.g., a surgical procedure to not 
have to have multiple asserted parents: health care encounter & treatment

Original comment by alanruttenberg@gmail.com on 21 Dec 2014 at 4:35

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Bill asks: 
What about when a patient takes his/her medicine at home?
Is that a realization of both roles?
It certainly seems like part of the patient's treatment.

AR: 
Good point - that doesn't work.

Looking more closely at the definition, I am wondering about what makes a 
"social process". For example, if there is only one participant, as in 
diagnosis or self-treatment (following the instructions of a health care 
professional) then how is this social? For diagnosis (doctor sitting in office 
after reviewing notes), the process doesn't necessarily include the patient 
participant.

Perhaps we should drop the part about "a social process that has at least one 
human participant and"

A planned process that includes as parts the treatment, diagnosis, or 
prevention of disease or injury--or the following of instructions of another 
human for treatment, diagnosis, or prevention

Treatment, diagnosis, and prevention doesn't seem to include activities like 
examination (more generally the creation of findings, including from lab tests, 
and imaging, observation, monitoring).

I'm not remembering the purpose of this class - it's a bit odd. By allowing a 
single person only and requiring the patient to participate, it admits some 
things like brushing teeth and washing hands, but not other things one might 
think it should, like filling out a medical questionnaire at home or having a 
technician count blood cells in a specimen from the patient.

--- 

The only other way I have of interpreting it is as a disconnected process - a 
process that is the union of all the temporal connected processes involved in 
health care for a single patient: Visiting the doctor + taking medicine + doing 
a lab test + ...

Participation is at a time, so such a process would satisfy that the patient 
participates even if not present during a part of the health care process.

I still think it should be a defined class for the reason I list above. Let me 
try:

any process that that :
- has a part that realizes the patient role,
AND
- has a part that realizes the health care provider role
AND
- all parts of which are only of type 
  - realizes the patient role
  OR
  - have specified output information about the patient
OR
  - achieve an objective that is a necessary precondition to one of the above

The last condition is to allow for things like cleaning a bedpan for someone in 
the hospital

A problem I see with this is that there are no clear boundaries - e.g. it could 
include all the treatments a patient ever has, and maybe the schooling of the 
clinicians that treat them.

Original comment by alanruttenberg@gmail.com on 22 Dec 2014 at 4:35

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Barry says: Treatment should, I fear, be treated as a defined class; since 
there are so many different sorts of treatment, adding it in to the asserted 
ontology will generate multifold multiple inheritance. 

AR: Do you have a suggestion on how would we completely define treatment?

Original comment by alanruttenberg@gmail.com on 22 Dec 2014 at 6:25