It’s also the case that merely having lab results come back in response to an order doesn’t necessarily mean the order is completely fulfilled. (E.g. some tests are still pending.)
Personally I think it’s a big deficiency in our Order model that we don’t allow an easy way to mark an order as complete/fulfilled (and thus no longer active).
(Presently there is an Order.dateStopped, which looks like it can only be set by discontinuing or revising the order.)
Whether we add a status, or add a stopReason, this would make things a lot more straightforward for the typical OpenMRS use case.
(If your architecture is such that you can’t figure out whether status/fulfillment has happened or not, you should ignore that field, but this shouldn’t prevent us from supporting this for the more typical OpenMRS use cases.)
FYI, FHIR’s Procedure Request resource has a status, that includes “completed”.