Dear Community,
As the overhaul of SNOMED is in progress, it’s a good time to revive the discussion concerning the hierarchy of Family History.
As you can see, the SNOMED hierarchy of Family History concepts is quite messy. We propose the creation of a specific hierarchy of new concepts:
- Our hierarchy could follow the structure of a genealogical tree with several orders of ancestry and include information about maternal and paternal relatives. If the information is not available, it probably requires another branch.
- We can omit the information about non-blood relatives, such as spouses, step-parents, step-children, step-siblings, etc. Or is there a use case?
- We can create pre-coordinated concepts that carry time-related information (e.g., decades of life) and embed them into the hierarchy of relatives. I would be happy to learn what time-related information is relevant to your research. And we can also discuss what other facts should be pre-coordinated in our hierarchy.
- We also should discuss the effort and time needed to create the above-mentioned hierarchy and to perform respective mappings.
We’ll be happy to hear your thoughts and ideas about this approach to the hierarchy of Family History.
Also, I invite everyone to discuss these questions in the scope of the WG call dedicated to SNOMED overhaul.
Regards,
Masha and the Vocabulary Team.