Hello, @jon_duke, seems like you have a great field of work
I will summarize a little what Christian said and add a few cents:
- For the ‘Ice Cream scenario’ seems reasonable to create local Observation concepts and write answers as strings or as concepts, both are fine.
- For some clinical cases, like ‘Do you have a cough?’ - ‘Yes’ I would recommend mapping this question-answer combination (you can create a specific precoordinated concept for it) to Standard ‘cough’.
- I think point 2 works fine with multiple-choice questions too. You can create a concept for each question-answer combination and map it to Standard. Or just map answers to standard conditions, which looks more reasonable. No need to use long strings.
- Regarding date and time, it always depends on the question and given context. In some registries, historical context is not stated in the question, but you can figure it out from metadata. You can also calculate the dates from the person’s age. Ex: Question: ‘Age when last ate meat’ Answer: ‘44 years’. And from the person table you know that patient is 46 now, so you can find precise historical concepts with following patterns History of clinical finding within n years/months/weeks, History of clinical finding longer than n years/months/weeks. They are extremely useful in registries’ mapping.
- You may also find our UKB experience interesting, we discussed it here, and our discussions resulted in this release and further discussions here.
Hope you will find something useful.
Registries are very interesting to work with 