Hi @Kang_Mira!
You’ve done tremendous work, thanks for the proposal.
At the same, there’s another recent proposal prepared by Marcel de Wilde and @Eduard_Korchmar.
And actually, we had a sort of convention. Not properly ratified, but the vocabularies are built exactly like that at the moment.
The key difference is whether we pre-coordinate, what, and how.
For the personal history, the decision was made and implemented some time ago in the vocabulary releases v20220510 and v20220829_major. But it’s true that we’re still missing the convention article.
For the family history, we can stick with the same model because:
- It’s the same model and as Eddy/Marcel pointed out “we prefer generic approaches so we can also write generic algorithms on this”.
- We avoid post-coordination of CDM records => no ugly fact_relationship, external keys or other unclear and slow heuristic.
- All conditions are allowed to be the values and represent the family history => no need to maintain this part and make arbitrary decisions on what has a genetic component, or not.
- The concepts that represent a family history in the actual relatives would be organized in the hierarchy that supports standardized analytics. If source data is not specific enough you’d map uphill to the “family history” top dog which would also be used if you don’t care about the level of relationship in your studies. To make this hierarchy rich and nice we’d recreate it using the SNOMED’s persons representation that supports the degrees and all the levels/details needed. I’d actually make it simpler even though organizing it into the hierarchy would resolve its massiveness. Such thing as the time context could be also addressed for some generic concepts if we’ll create the concepts like “FH of the first degree relative less than 50 years of age”. Even if we would add 5-10 permutations with different life-span periods for each concept in the hierarchy (not sure it’s needed), we’re still within the reasonable amount of concepts.
The only concern in this approach is the effort needed to compile a new hierarchy and handle an old one with the respective mappings from the existing source and Standard concepts.