Closed mikix closed 1 month ago
there are a number of fields in here that are outside of US core - and we've got requests for more (#190 #185, for two).
there's a needle to thread here between clinical value/ease of use/spec compliance. and since we're basically saying 'we need flattened tables for analyst usage' to avoid all the complex type detection stuff, we're sort of overloading the core study.
so, just spitballing some options:
Yeah some combo of documentation / leaving alone and being aware of it as we onboard sites with unusual EHRs is probably fine enough.
I was just surprised at how lightly-supported Encounter references could be! But in practice, they do have wide support.
closing this as covered via #280
Examples:
An EHR might very well choose to not provide Encounters. That might be crazy? I dunno. But nothing in the FHIR spec or US Core is asking them to fill that field out, even if the data is available to them.
So by providing those fields in
core
, are we encouraging study authors to develop bad habits like using theencounter_ref
field for joins. And then when an EHR comes by with full US Core compliance and those fields are allnull
, the study might not find any conditions if they are expecting encounter joins to work (rather than patient joins, which the spec does require).Maybe we need Encounters too badly (for sequence of event thinking) to drop them and the chance of having such a rude EHR is slim. :shrug:
But worth thinking about not overpromising on fields that aren't in US Core, as we add core tables.