Hey @sigfried_gold, thanks for digging in and making contributions to the
community. There’s no one ‘right’ solution, but thankfully due to all of
amazing work by @christian_reich, we have several good alternatives
available in the ohdsi vocabulary.
When we were building achilles, we faced the same issue, where we used the
vocabulary classification as part of a tree map to show the prevalence of
all conditions and all drugs. For better or worse, we chose there to use
meddra as the condition hierarchy for Snomed concepts and atc as the drug
hierarchy for rxnorm ingredients. Its not perfect, nut i was pretty happy
with the results. Here’s link to see for yourself:
http://www.ohdsi.org/web/achilles/#/OHDSI Sample Database/conditions
The achilles package has sql that you could borrow for this purpose.
Here’s a link to a file inside of github as an example:
https://github.com/OHDSI/Achilles/blob/master/inst/sql/sql_server/export_v5/condition/sqlConditionTreemap.sql
Also, there are webapi calls that use the vocabulary that can help with
this, but one step at a time:)
Sigfried_Gold http://forums.ohdsi.org/users/sigfried_gold
February 10
I’m trying to build some visualization tools for looking at patient
clinical histories, individual and in summary. It’s been a while since I’ve
worked with medical terminologies. I’m using the 1000-patient simulated
dataset for now, so it’s all SNOMED and RxNorm. I was hoping to be able to
walk up a hierarchy or somehow group conditions and drugs into
lower-granularity concepts. Ideally (for visualization) a top level would
have 5 to 20 terms, and each more granular level would break each term into
another 5 to 20 sub-terms. I can deal with networks of concepts that aren’t
strict hierarchies, or with each term being a node in several different
terminology networks; but visualization gets much more difficult when a
concept has hundreds of “siblings” and no useful “parent”.
I thought I’d ask the community if there’s any way to organize (especially
drug and condition) concepts the way I’m describing before I give up in
despair.
Thanks!
Sigfried
