Does it make sense to have Conditions linked to an Encounter in our data model?
Why I believe this is required?
At Mekom, we are consuming the <condition/> HFE tag in a couple of forms, this tag is used for capturing Conditions of a patient. While in ‘view’ mode(of the form), we require to view conditions recorded for that particular encounter.
@dkayiwa assuming we do this, will it be possible to backport it to 2.3.x? Because we will need this soon and I don’t think we can go through the release of 2.4.0.
We generally back port bug fixes instead of new features. But we have once in a while broken this rule to address a real practical need. Basing on the circumstances that you are in, and the fact that it is small change, i would say YES to back porting it to platform 2.3.x
Certainly no reason to prohibit conditions from being tied to encounters – with some notes:
There have been numerous discussions on Condition Lists (search for it in Talk) and the difference between them and Encounter Diagnoses. The link below is one to consider. The upshot is that if you want to say what health issue was the focus of an encounter, that’s the diagnosis. It you want to say what health issues a patient has – generally long-term – those are conditions. They interplay in a manner described in the link.
That said, a clinician could reasonably choose to mark a particular condition as something that was relevant to a particular encounter (PS I’ve built this very feature several times in other systems, and few if any clinicians have ever used it). As long as it’s optional, there’s nothing semantically or clinically wrong with offering the linkage.
While I have no opposition to the change here, I just want to note for posterity that the boundaries between a FHIR Condition and an OpenMRS Condition are different. In particular, a FHIR Condition is exactly the resource to use to express an encounter diagnosis as well as an on-going problem. While, like @jteich, I don’t think there’s a good semantic reason not to store the encounter in which the condition occurred, we do have to navigate the difficulty of having diagnoses stored as Obs and problems stored as conditions. FHIR differentiates these two uses of Condition via the Condition.category field.
E.g., to build current problem list for a patient, one might use this query in FHIR:
