I think you’re missing a critical piece (which is what the past few posts of mine have been focused on) which is the intent of the record in the DRUG_EXPOSURE record: is it the patient experience or is it including the provider intent (ie: it did not happen to the patient, but it was requested by a provider).
we covered that, I think we all agree that there is no 100% in observational data, and you have the flexibility of determine what strength of the evidence exists to assert the fact, but…and this is the important bit: the fact states that the patient experienced the effect of the drug.
Discussed that too in the prior point, in that different capture mechanisms will give you different levels of confidence about the fact: patient experienced the effect of the drug
#3 is the closest to the point except it’s still not clear the nature of the fact that we’re specifying in the DRUG_EXPOSURE table. ‘If i see an order for this drug, i can assume that it is taken by the patient’ is an inference about a drug being experienced by the patient. I don’t know about everyone else, but that is a big fly in my ointment about what the record in the DRUG_EXPOSURE is meant to represent. There are ideas that people would like to study the relationship between requests of treatment (aka orders) and the actual effect of treatment (aka: the exposure) and, IMO, the current CDM does not provide a place to store provider requests for treatment (in absence of the statement of if that treatment was experienced by the patient). If people want to do it today, then they can load up an auxiliary table that captures only requests by providers for a medication for a patient. If we want to support standard analytics around it, we should think about storing it in standard tables.
The crux of my argument is storing conflicting facts (order = provider request, without any statement that the patient experienced the drug; exposure = patient experienced effect of drug) in a single table is wrong, and I’d like the CDM remain ‘clean’ in that there’s no ambiguity between the facts.within each table.
It depends on what we want to capture in the CDM…currently (if I’m not mistaken), We’re simplifying those 3 mechanisms into one statement of patient exposure to a drug: orders, dispensing and administrations can infer a drug exposure. But all records in DRUG_EXPOSURE represent an inferred exposure. When people say ‘I have orders, and I know when I dispense them, should I put the order in the exposure table?’, I think the answer is ‘no’ because only one of those facts represents the patient experience of being exposed to a drug.
Maybe the answer is that I’ve been looking at that table wrong this entire time and I should have been asserting the type of evidence to use as my drug exposure. But, that really complicates my logic for selecting records: before i was simply ‘give me the observations of exposures’ but now it is going to be something like “Select drug exposures inferred from
orders that didn’t have dispensing, or dispensing without administrations, or administrations”…ugly,.and I have to tie all 3 of those mechanisms together to associate them to the single ‘this patient was exposed’ event. yuck.