I should have added that this is not an openEHR issue but applies to the whole of health informatics and would, IMO, make an excellent subject for a PhD. We badly need the kind of academic analysis equivalent to Alan Rector's work on the 'clinical statement' pattern which underpins most of SNOMED, openEHR, 13606 and HL7 semantics.
Ian Dr Ian McNicoll office +44 (0)1536 414994 fax +44 (0)1536 516317 mobile +44 (0)775 209 7859 skype ianmcnicoll ian.mcnicoll at oceaninformatics.com Clinical analyst,?Ocean Informatics, UK openEHR Clinical Knowledge Editor www.openehr.org/knowledge Honorary Senior Research Associate, CHIME, UCL BCS Primary Health Care ?www.phcsg.org On 9 February 2011 17:29, Thomas Beale <thomas.beale at oceaninformatics.com> wrote: > On 09/02/2011 15:05, pablo pazos wrote: > > I agree with you Thomas but there's always some implicit semantics, I mean: > when there is no data, it is taken as false, but what happen if the person > who do the questionnaire do not try to make this question false? May be > he/her didn't want to answer, and this false could have value/semantics in > clinical or legal fields. > > Hi Pablo, > > my point is that in some cases, researchers construct questionnaires for > healthcare use that will have some purely boolean answers, and they simply > won't use responses containing missing answers, i.e. they will only use > clean data. A question like 'have you ever had children' for example in such > a questionnaire can be modelled as Boolean if the researcher wants simply to > divide the population into two - women who gave birth, and women who never > did. Any response like 'don't know' would be discarded in such a study. I am > not saying that this is good study design, or anything else (it isn't my > area), but we can't prevent medical researchers from creating questionnaires > with purely boolean answers, if that is what their statistical computing > model requires. > > - thomas > > > > _______________________________________________ > openEHR-technical mailing list > openEHR-technical at openehr.org > http://lists.chime.ucl.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/openehr-technical > >
