What concept(s) are you using for cause of death for your implementations?

Implementing Terminology
2

Base on this thread, it looks like cause of death is a bit confusing in OpenMRS.

The data model supports time and cause of death (coded) as attributes for a person. There has been some recent discussion in the Bahmni distribution about allowing free text as well.

It looks like we require a “cause of death” concept in order to get possible answers. In older versions of OpenMRS, there’s some funky code that creates an cause of death observation (presumably to allow for non-coded responses?). This has been removed and now we just update the date and cause of death on the person object as expected.

In CIEL, one can find a CAUSE OF DEATH (5002) concept, but it has been voided. From what I’ve seen, folks are using PROBABLE CAUSE OF DEATH (1599). While this is technically different than the purpose of the Person.cause_of_death attribute (“probable” is used to record what family or caretakers believe might have caused death), it’s probably fair to assume the choice lists (possible answers) could be the same.

We should probably make a ticket for fixing this. Something like:

  • Add PROBABLE CAUSE OF DEATH (1599) to OpenMRS Platform’s default dataset
  • Change the default value for the concept.causeOfDeath global property to 1599.
  • Consider whether or not to add some default answers so patients can be marked as dead within OpenMRS without needing to first create concept and set a global property.
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