hi Tom I was working with Heather today on the imaging exam archetype. Two different considerations associated with identifiers came up during our work.
The first is that in the archetype design we came up with (still be posed on CKM yet), there's a lot of identifiers present. These identifiers are required to deal with the interoperability aspects of the imaging exam report (i.e. PACS reigsters images with RIS, RIS provides report to EHR, EHR tracks identifiers so it can provide links to RIS/PACS resources as required). In particular, in several places there's slots for various DICOM UIDs. To me, these are IT issues, not clinical issues, so they shouldn't be part of the archetype design (on the basis that archetypes are *clinica* knowledge)- but I do know that we absolutely need these identifiers. Is there a policy about this? Note that I ask this question with wider issues about whether IT and interoperability concerns should be explicitly represented in archetypes. The second question is that there seemed to be some operating guidance to archetype designers to use the Text data type rather than the Identifier type for these fields talked about above on the basis that they are "foreign" identifiers. There didn't seem to be particular consensus on where this policy came from (and I don't want to point fingers...) but it seems pretty nuts to me. These things should be identifiers, and we should insist on tracking the issuer of them (though I couldn't care less about the type, and indeed, the presence of type on DV_Identifier represents confused modeling). In our archetype, we changed all the identifiers from Text to Identifier. Is there any rules about this? Grahame
