Hi Tom,
I agree with Grahame, in over 20 years of implementing real systems, I don’t 
think I recall having seen one value-set that hasn’t been extended at some 
point when locally implemented. Even HL7 defined tables in V2 that were 
supposed to not be extended have been extended.

There is a big difference between best-practice and reality and we don’t want 
to be putting any more barriers to adoption.

To be honest, I am not sure that using required at an archetype level would be 
wise, it may be something that can be used at a template level.

You could argue that preferred covers extensible and I agree that example may 
not be useful in models, but has proven to be useful as a guide for FHIR 
readers.

Therefore, I think we still have Boolean option, either required or 
preferred/extensible/example.

Having said that, using a Boolean doesn’t allow for us to support a valid use 
case in the future and I see some value in aligning with the FHIR options (if 
HL7 allow us to do that) even if we only support a subset.

Regards

Heath

From: openEHR-technical <[email protected]> On Behalf 
Of Grahame Grieve
Sent: Tuesday, 16 April 2019 7:03 AM
To: For openEHR technical discussions <[email protected]>
Subject: Re: FHIR-like terminology 'binding strengths'?

hi Tom

We did not define extensible bindings because we like it. Using it creates many 
issues and it's problematic. We defined it because it's a very real world 
requirement, in spite of it's apparent 'unreliability'.

The use cases arises naturally when
- the approval cycle of changes to the value set is slower than operational 
requirements
- the value set is large, and a community can only get partial agreement in the 
space. This is actually pretty common - typically, clinical code sets may need 
to contain 5000-50000 concepts, but most of that is a very loooong tail, and 
95%+ of the use comes from 200-400 common codes. There's plenty of clinical 
communities investing time in requiring common agreed codes with fixed 
granularity for the head of the distribution.

Neither of these things are an issue if openEHR is just targeting single 
application functionality. But as soon as the community that maintains the 
value set is wider than the users of a single system, then extensible bindings 
are inevitable.

You can consider it bad... but that doesn't make it go away. Nor does it reduce 
the value of the agreements that do exist.

Grahame


On Tue, Apr 16, 2019 at 1:27 AM Thomas Beale 
<[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:

Last week, we had a workshop on ADL2 in Germany, to try to sort out a few 
issues on the way to making ADL2 mainstream in openEHR implementations. See 
here for the wiki 
page<https://openehr.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/ADL/pages/382599192/ADL2%2BTooling%2BWorkshop%2B2019>.

One of the issues discussed was on what basis terminology code constraints 
(value sets, generally) in archetypes (or templates) could be considered 
optional, recommended etc (discussion page 
here<https://openehr.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/ADL/pages/386007225/Local+Value-set+Replacement>).
 Some here will recognise this question as roughly the one that FHIR's 'binding 
strengths'<http://hl7.org/fhir/R4/terminologies.html#strength> tries to solve. 
I can understand two of the settings:

  *   required: thou shalt use one of these here codes
  *   preferred: we recommend these codes but you can use what you like

I don't know how useful it is to put 'example' value sets in a content model, 
since there might be many possible examples, differing across the world. If 
there is an obvious example that makes sense for the scope / geography of 
application of the archetype, e.g. some SNOMED or LOINC subset, then this seems 
to me to be a case of 'preferred'.

But my main issue is with 'extensible'. In FHIR, this means: you should use one 
of these codes if it applies to your concept, but otherwise you can use 
something else. In my view, in reality, this is the same as 'preferred'. It's 
worth considering what it would mean to mandate codes that are supplied in a 
value-set, but then to say, for other meanings not covered, use something else. 
This means that the value-set is considered not to be complete, i.e. to 
exhaustively cover the concept space. Supplying half-built value-sets seems 
like a very unreliable thing to be doing in shared clinical models. Is the 
value set 90% complete? Or only 10%? The whole idea of specifying partial value 
sets in clinical models just seems bad to me.

If we assume that value sets are always well-designed, and exhaustive, then the 
only real 'binding strengths' are: required | optional.

I have proposed that this be modelled as:

  *   required: Boolean
  *   recommendation: enum ( preferred | example )

If we get rid of the example idea (which I think is just noise) then we just 
need 'required'. If required is false, and there is a value set specified, 
clearly it is 'preferred' or recommended in some sense. If there is no value 
set, it's truly open.

Interested in other thoughts on this, particularly a) users of this FHIR scheme 
and b) SNOMED, LOINC, ICD etc specialists.
--
Thomas Beale
Principal, Ars Semantica<http://www.arssemantica.com>
Consultant, ABD Project, Intermountain 
Healthcare<https://intermountainhealthcare.org/>
Management Board, Specifications Program Lead, openEHR 
Foundation<http://www.openehr.org>
Chartered IT Professional Fellow, BCS, British Computer 
Society<http://www.bcs.org/category/6044>
Health IT blog<http://wolandscat.net/> | Culture 
blog<http://wolandsothercat.net/> | The Objective 
Stance<https://theobjectivestance.net/>
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