> The Dutch GP organization NHG has defined Episode as: > An Episode is a chronological collection of medical data (episode > items) of one patient and describes the state changes over time > concerning one health problem. This is what GnuMed uses, too.
> The name of the episode describes the health problem (health issue) > and can be changed over time. Same with GnuMed. We allow any item within the clinical narrative to be declared the defining item for the episode name. The episode name describes the current active health problem. The term health issue is used to describe underlying, more general (chronic?) issues with one's health. Those are highly likely to affect health of the entire lifetime with differing levels of activity (eg. may be dormant for a while but will still exist as a "threat"). Such a health issue may show up in several episodes each of which pertains to a different episode in time where a particular health problem was active. > The episode unordered list contains all episodes, open or closed. > Episodes can have an attribute indicating "attention" We consider the episode to "just be there" whether we pay attention to it or not (and different clinicians may in fact define the open-/closedness of an episode differently - and they can, it's at the discreetion of the user to define their state). Only members of it (eg. clinical items being attached to an episode) can be "clinically_relevant" (eg. need attention). One may want to define the deliberate association that any episode with a clinical item that is clinically_relevant to always be open. But this does not seem mandatory. > Episodes can be closed and opened. Agree. > Episodes can be joined and split Agree. > One episode consists of episode items. Agree. > Episode items are: report as the result of a contact, > Prescription/Order, Diagnostic Archive, Correspondence. > I consider Episodes as an alternative view on the information > collected. Agree. > It is a list consisting of links pointing to registered information > that is available in the system. We have that information always bound to an episode - that which is bounded by the states the primary clinician thinks is useful. This we can do because we target the GP/community specialist setting. It can be redefined, however. Karsten Hilbert, MD GnuMed i18n coordinator -- 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
