Request: Timelines feature should allow for concept conjunctions (or a "funnel mode")

[jnothman]

Timelines is a very neat tool, but often we want to know how many patients have all of a set of concepts over time (especially in the research clinic context where a battery of tests would be common).

One way to do this is to switch on a funnel-like visualisation concept, such that each lower timeline reflects the conditional frequency of patients with an event in that time given the concepts above it are also present.

[jnothman]

Although maybe what we want to know is different from the purpose of the Timeline. I think the exploratory query on our part is: How many years/months/weeks can I track patients across variables of interest (relative to some index date)?

I suspect the query in the current timeline tool is: When did events occur relative to some event of interest?

Maybe these are sufficiently different for our need to not be met by the timeline tool. Still, concept conjunctions (or other boolean expressions) might get us some way there.

Maybe our query above is best presented as a survival curve, where the survival time would be defined by the time between a two index date definitions (e.g. first MRI and last MRI).

[ndobb]

These are great points, @jnothman. I'm actually quite open to re-imagining / expanding the functionality of Timelines so as to make it flexible and viewable in many other ways. The great thing is that ultimately the data needed from the API is really the same, it's just a matter of adding more variety in ways to interpret / visualize it.

Would you be willing to post a few simple pictures of the kind of visualization and interaction you have in mind?

PS - I'm considering at an individual patient-level (rather than only current aggregate) view within Timelines, so that may be an additional feature as well.