But the question around can you trust the data is, can you recognize properly when the units are ucum or not? For some reason I haven't put my finger on, you are linking the knowing of this with the boundary of the type. It's not clear to me why you're making that link.
Grahame On 19/03/2012, at 9:25 PM, Thomas Beale <thomas.beale at oceaninformatics.com> wrote: > On 19/03/2012 02:15, Grahame Grieve wrote: >> >> for me, conversion between different units that are comparable. You >> should ask Tom what else he thinks it yields up. I'd be interested. >> >> Grahame >> >> >> > > well any mathematical operation working on quantities - e.g. averages, max, > min, variance, standard deviation etc etc. These kind of operations are > ubiquitous in research queries, and will become increasingly so in personal > health records. Just consider what is needed to determine the actual amount > of tobacco consumed by each of 10,000 patients in a cohort - each of whom > report their usage in terms of 'tailor-made cigarettes', 'hand-rolled > cigarettes', 'cigars', 'chewing tobacco' (okay not popular, but still in use > in some places!), 'grams a week (of pipe tobacco)', etc etc. Some patients > have a mixture of these. > > Same argument for amounts of drugs taken by patients in a cancer study, > amounts of sugar, salt, cholesterol computed from food recorded in patient > diet and so on. How about a query that finds all patients with blood sugar > over 7? What if they input the data (at home) in different unit systems due > to different equipment? > > We simply can't do any useful computing if we can't trust the data. We don't > do that much computing now with it because of the unreliability of the > available data, but the only interesting future really is being able to do > intelligent computing with the data. To get there we have to be able to > compute reliably with quantities. > > I have no problem with data that records only 'puffs', 'patches', > 'pessaries', 'pills', 'pellets' or 'powder'.... but we don't want to > compromise data that record normal scientific quantities. Therefore I think > we should be treating these kind of amounts as a separate type. This is > distinct from the problem of Quantities that do have scientific units, but > there is a conflict with the displayable form. I think we should accommodate > that in the current data type - a small modification would take care of that. > > - thomas > > _______________________________________________ > openEHR-technical mailing list > openEHR-technical at lists.openehr.org > http://lists.openehr.org/mailman/listinfo/openehr-technical_lists.openehr.org -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://lists.openehr.org/pipermail/openehr-technical_lists.openehr.org/attachments/20120321/d6bf1d82/attachment.html>
