> The concept of modelling the symptoms in a genric manner manner and have > these called up whenever there is a need to record the details. I am not sure I fully understand what you want to say. What do you mean by "modelling the symptoms" ?
Symptoms could be recorded as free text. This approach you describe as inadequate. It *is* inadequate if the goal is to process the input computationally. The solution is not, however, to use (inadequate) coding systems as is discussed in Slee, Slee, Schmidt, "The Endangered Medical Record" (excerpt available from http://www.tringa.com ). Another approach would be to really *model* symptoms based on openEHR archetypes. This promises to offer some degree of computationality yet preserve the free text. Others in this list have more experience with that. Data-mining, however, shouldn't be the aim of an EMR. It should be focussed on patient care. Data-mining will occur with aggregates of extracts *from* EMRs. Karsten Hilbert, MD -- GPG key ID E4071346 @ wwwkeys.pgp.net E167 67FD A291 2BEA 73BD 4537 78B9 A9F9 E407 1346 - If you have any questions about using this list, please send a message to d.lloyd at openehr.org
