Hello everyone I am coming across an openEHR use case for which there seem to be more than one ways to deal with and that i would appreciate your help with.
The main question is this: When creating COMPOSITIONs that describe Template(able) stand-alone entities that are well defined and should have clear relationships with each other, is it a good practice to include "ID"s and references in order to establish these relationships? A representative example: In a Clinical Trials setting, there exist entities that should have clear relationships with each other in order for queries to return properly structured data that can later be used in analysis. For example, a COMPOSITION describing a "Site" should have a harder way of linking it to the "Trial" than simple membership to the same EHR Folder (The naming of the Folder will become an issue). All the same, the most interesting COMPOSITION, the one that contains the data collected, should have a hard way of referencing [the "Trial", "Site", "Stage", "Research Staff performing the data collection"] or other entity. Some of these relationships are already there (A Trial Group (e.g. Control / Condition A, B, C), can possibly be expressed via the entities in the Demographics package) and i suppose that it is advisable to use them but what about describing new relationships? Looking forward to hearing from you Athanasios Anastasiou. P.S. Do you think that it would be beneficial to add an "OBJECT_RELATIONSHIP" entity to the Content package just like the "Party_Relationship" of the Demographics Package? This would completely describe relationships between entities (source, target, ordering, multiplicity,...). In this way, we could even do away with the "strict" tree organisation of the EHR and express the whole storage as a graph of Template(able) entities interconnected with (proper) "OBJECT_RELATIONSHIP"s. What do you think?
