well... good question. So in other words: if there is a units field
specifically for 'formal' units, is it UCUM only or not? I would have
said it should be except for annoying problems like the one Heath
mentioned - UCUM uses '*' for exponent instead of '^' which almost
everyone else uses....
We could use the same approach as an openEHR DV_PARSABLE, where the name
of the syntax is stored as well, but this is IMO inviting a different
kind of pain...
My answer would be: let's get UCUM doing everything we need (for the
formal units field I mean, not the informal one); if we can't, we need a
new UCUM.
- thomas
Hi Thomas,
'^' is a special character in HL7 V2.x messages - so by changing '*'
back to '^' you would break implementations of HL7 ORU messages. We already
see this in some lab messages - if you try to parse the units field you get
"x10" instead of "x10^9/L", because OBX-6 is a coded element (CE) data type.
UCUM also uses annotations which are a bit unsightly e.g. mmol/mol creat is
expressed as mmol/mol {creat}. I'm all in favour of a display component
for units of measure - in the end you are still getting coded data.
Cheers,
Michael Osborne
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