Most of the issues you raised will be described in the upcoming comprehensive documentation about EPISODE population for oncology. To highlight some conventions that address your questions:
- No data should be extracted directly from the source into EPISODE. Population of the EPISODE should be done post-ETL, very similar to population of ERA tables.
- Since initial target of episode information is the regular OMOP tables (conditions, procedures), we introduced episode-related modifiers like ‘Initial diagnosis’.
- The same episode (e.g. episode of disease progression) can be derived using the modifiers if available or algorithmically. Therefore, preserving provenance of episode derivation is key to understanding validity of the data and comparing different methods.
- Yes, we want to reflect regimens that are not available in HemOnc proper in EPISODE. Custom regimen concepts should be created for this purpose.
Stay tuned for more conventions + greater details in the documentation.