Text Package

Narrative text items are used in the EHR in a number of cases, including:

While narrative text items themselves are not themselves coded, they may have code phrases associated with them, as described below under Mappings, and may be mixed within a paragraph with coded items.

Textual entities available in a terminology service are used in the health record to enable processing, from simple queries to decision support. Reasons for using terminology include the following.

A basic requirement for interoperability of text items, coded using terms (i.e. where the text is the official rubric for the code), is that both the rubric and the code (or 'code-phrase') must be recorded, to ensure the originally intended text is retained for receivers of EHR information who do not have access to the terminologies used at the origin. However, where a terminology service is available, the key can be used to unambiguously locate the string value of the term, and can also be used to find translations in other languages. (Note that these comments do not apply to mappings, which are described below).

In some terminologies, there are semantic networks of links emanating from most coded terms, which classify them or relate them to other terms. Such links provide a means for decision support to make inferences about specific things found in the record. For instance if the term "leukaemia" is found, queries to the terminology service can be made in order to deduce that the patient has both a "cancer" and a "disease of the immune system" (assuming leukaemia is classified under these more general terms in the terminology).

This specification assumes the existence of a terminology service which is responsible for interrogating actual terminologies and performing validated coordination of terms, i.e. creating combinations deemed valid by the underlying source terminology, potentially without even assigning a new code to the result. All validated coordination is carried out inside the terminology service, and any 'term' made available by the service is already 'coordinated'. The difference between 'pre-coordinated' and 'post-coordinated' terms is that the former have a single code, whereas the latter have a code phrase, or expression that is interpretable by the terminology. For example, the coordination "foot, left" (a shorthand way of writing the relationship "foot has-laterality left") could be created by the terminology service from the source terms "foot", "left" and "has-laterality" from a terminology such as SNOMED CT. Any such coordination must be valid within the source terminology, i.e. correspond to valid relationships defined therein.

The semantics attached to post-coordinations of terms may differ. Two categories of coordination described in the literature are 'qualification' and 'modification'. A common definition of the first is that qualification 'narrows meaning' - i.e. creates a new term whose possible real world instances are within the set denoted by the original root term. Modification on the other hand changes the meaning of a root term. Various cases are described below under Meaning Modification. Both coordination types are assumed to be managed by the terminology service.

Coded terms may also be mapped to terms from other terminologies, which may be intended as equivalents, classifiers, or something in between. The section below on Mappings deals with these.

In cases where openEHR data is used to represent data originally represented in other formats, one common requirement is to be able to represent both the term chosen by the user at data capture time, and also the corresponding preferred term, where the two are different. This allows both the user’s specific choice and the 'standard term' to be captured.

Secondly, where term mappings are represented it is useful to be able to capture not just the code or code-phrase of the mapped term, but the preferred term or expression text, in order to make the mapped term self-standing in the data.

In modern information systems in all industries, the ability to visually format text exists. EHR systems are no different, and authors of narrative text parts of the health record expect to be able to create longer tracts of text that include paragraphs, bolding, bullet lists and other typical structures, as well as simple atoms of text. Generally speaking, the text associated with a coded term is a simple string, devoid of formatting or newlines, and if the text is a direct copy of the rubric (i.e. term) from a terminology, this will almost always be the case. However there is no guarantee that this will not change in the future, with perhaps newlines and e.g. bolding being used in 'rich text' rubrics.

Clinicians need the freedom to maximise clarity of any text they write, and therefore should be able to include a reasonable level of formatting in text.

One class of modifers is exemplified by the addition of words like 'risk of', 'fear of', 'history of' and so on. These are sometimes called mode-changing terms, since they change the 'mode' of the root term from the present to the past ('history of'), a potential future ('risk of') or some other possible reality. Terms which are modified in this way should never be matched in queries searching for the root term; for example, a query for 'coronary diease' (of the patient) should not match 'family history of coronary disease'.

There are many terms whose meaning is changed by the context in which they are stated, such as within a certain kind of note or test result. Consider the following:

Negation is a special kind of mode change and has been a serious design challenge in the past, because modifiers like 'not' or 'no' only make sense when attached to some terms, and create nonsensical values or ambiguities by arbitrarily association with other terms.

Rather than provide explicit features for representing modifier terms within DV_CODED_TEXT, the general principle underlying representation of all post-coordinations other than qualifications, is that a higher-level, archetyped structure such as an ENTRY (defined in the EHR RM), is a minimal indivisible unit of information. Such higher-level entities can have internal structure, and it is possible (and desirable) to achieve the effect of combinations of terms through this structure. In the case of ENTRY, it will be via structuring of CLUSTER/ELEMENT objects. The general rule is: to obtain the full meaning of any terms found in the record, all of the node names in any ENTRY (coded or not) must be considered from the root to the relevant leaf. Conversely, the "final" meaning of any term in the record cannot be known in isolation from the rest of the terms in the structure.

Accordingly, the concept "family history of coronary disease" is represented as an ENTRY whose root is named (for example) "subject family history", and which includes further structure, which may be in greater of lesser detail; the coded term "coronary disease" would appear somewhere in this structure. The actual structure is completely defined by appropriate archetypes. Contrary to some perceptions, there is no general way to represent concepts such as "family history of coronary disease", since it will vary depending on how much detail is recorded. Where some GPs routinely record just the simplest form, others may record the details of which family members had heart problems and exactly what they were.

The same approach is used for context-dependent terms. Archetypes defining contexts such as "planned procedures" or "differential diagnosis" will use these terms as their root nodes; as a result, the meaning of any term appearing below the root can only be understood by including the root. Once again, the exact structures are completely dependent upon archetyping, and may be simple or quite sophisticated.

Negations are more complex than might first be apparent and are best handled by good archetype design. Terminologies might provide a term such as "No known allergies" which is helpful. But if someone has an allergy of some sort, the medicolegal requirement might be to record that the person has no known allergies to penicillin or another class of medication that is being prescribed. The often proposed approach of using a generic negation 'modifier' to deal with such issues results in further problems. Consider the use of negation with liver - "no liver", "no palpable liver", "no liver disease", "no history of liver disease", "no liver function", "no liver function tests". The meaning of negated terms may be non-sensical and difficult to interpret.

A basic principle of dealing with negatives is to realise that most naïve suggested use cases are quite ambiguous as stated. Does "no allergies" mean "no reported episode of allergy", "no allergic reactions ever", "no known allergies to medication" or something else? Does it mean that these statements are taken as given by the patient, or determined by tests? Like all medical phenomena, allergies must be described in some detail for the EHR to be of any real use. Almost inevitably, this precludes the use of negated terms. Since the actual information structure will be determined in advance by archetype designers, clinicians will almost never be in the situation of having to negate a term. However, if the need does arise, it should be dealt with by a negative or quantitative answer, i.e. a value rather than a name. For example, in any ENTRY describing current problems, the clinician may record the name/value pair "allergies: NONE". Here, "allergies" will be a DV_CODED_TEXT, and "NONE" will be either a DV_CODED_TEXT or a DV_TEXT; the two will be associated by a containing object, such as an instance of the ELEMENT class from the EHR RM. There is no explicit model of negation in openEHR.

Any text item, whether coded or not, may be classified with a coded term, for research, reporting and decision support purposes. For example, a GP working in tropical Australia may wish to write "Ross River infection", and be working with ICD9, which does not contain this term (although ICD9-CM does). He or she will use a plain text item, but will still be able to map it to an ICD9 classifier, such as the code for "arbovirus infection NOS". The same approach can be used for adding a classifying term to a coded text item. The utility of classifier terms is various: they allow decision support to make more powerful inferences; in situations where the available terminologies do not provide the classification inbuilt, and where it is known that not all users of EHR data will have terminologies available. In data terms, classification mapping can be visualised as illustrated below.

Classifying mappings are represented by adding a term to the mappings list of the original term. Each mapping is explicitly represented with an instance of TERM_MAPPING, which indicates both the term being associated with the original text item, and a value of '>' for the match attribute, which indicates that the mapping is "broader". The possible values of the match attribute are '>' (broader), '<' (narrower), and '=' (equivalent); they are taken from the ISO standards ISO 2788 - Guide to Establishment and development of monolingual thesauri and ISO 5964 - Guide to Establishment and development of multilingual thesauri.

Data from pathology laboratories has often been coded using a terminology local to the laboratory, due to lack of or economic unfeasibility of using existing widespread terminologies for the job. However, some laboratories also supply a nearest equivalent code from a well-known terminology such as LOINC, to enable the receiver of the data to process it in a more standard fashion. Here, "equivalence" is taken to mean a term of the same meaning but from a different vocabulary.

Another instance where equivalent terms might be supplied is to effect the translation of terms across specialist vocabularies such as nursing vocabularies when sharing EHRs across jurisdictions.

In theory, the cleanest way for senders and receivers of data coded with both a local and a more standard equivalent to deal with the mapping problem is for the originator of the local terminology to provide a complete thesaurus of translations into one or more recognised terminologies. However, in practice, laboratories using the HL7 v2.x messaging standard usually encode a primary term and equivalents with the HL7 CE data type, meaning that equivalents are included only with the term they are used with. A similar pragmatic approach to mapping equivalent terms in the EHR is likely to be used with the data types described here, and can be effected with the same mapping approach as for classification.

A further situation in which text values - this time plain text - is mapped to equivalent terms is when natural language processing is used to generate coded terms for existing free-text prose. The aim of such processing is to detect word phrases and associate them with a coded term of the same meaning, without obliterating the original text. In terms of the model described here, a CODE_PHRASE is associated with a DV_TEXT instance via the mappings attribute.

In all cases with equivalents, the value of the match attribute is '=', indicating that the mapping is a synonym.

Occasionally, there is a need to create a mapping to a term of narrower meaning than the original text item. Circumstances in which this occurs include when a clinician wants to record a syndrome such as "croup" or "influenza", but the terminology does not contain these general terms, although it does contain more specific terms, e.g. "viral laryngo-tracheitis" or "influenza type A". Clearly the clinician should be allowed to record what he/she wants (as plain text if necessary), but it should also be possible to add a mapping to the more precise term. For mappings to narrower terms, the value of the match attribute is '<'.

It has been argued in GEHR [1] that UMLS reference terms should also be supplied with occurrences of coded terms, in the form of the UMLS concept unique identifier, or "CUI". UMLS is a way of encoding terms developed at the National Library of Medicine in the United States, and consists of a meta-thesaurus, in which terms from any extant term set (such as ICDx, SNOMED CT, READ) can be cross-referenced. UMLS CUIs could turn out to be extremely useful for decision support and reporting.

The proper use of UMLS is that terms from particular terminologies are passed to a UMLS interface and a CUI + rubric received in response. However, the mapping approach described above could also be used to map UMLS CUIs to existing text or terms in an EHR; in this case, a DV_CODED_TEXT is constructed for each UMLS "term", where the code is the CUI and the rubric is the text rendering of the CUI (guaranteed unique in UMLS). The same approach can be used for any other thesaurus which becomes available in the future.

In cases where legacy data has to be converted to openEHR-compliant data, and only codes are available, e.g. ICD or ICPC codes, the following approach is recommended:

This expresses the reality that no text was ever recorded in the legacy system; rather a code was recorded directly in the data field. In the converted data, this code is more correctly considered a mapping.

In a concrete instance of DV_TEXT, the following are the likely usages of the value and formatting attributes. The hyperlink is assumed to be Void in all non-legacy cases.

In a concrete instance of DV_CODED_TEXT, the following are the likely usages of the value and formatting attributes. The hyperlink is assumed to be Void in all non-legacy cases.