What is the difference between visit_concept_id and visit_type_concept_id?
All fields are documented. See here. Bottom line: One is a running number of all visits (like a row number), the other one a foreign key to the CONCEPT table pointing at a concept that describes the visit type or provenance of the information that there is a vist.
Hey Christian - thanks for that. I did see that page but was still confused about the meaning of those fields. Visit_concept_id valid values are the concept_id’s from the concept table where domain_id = ‘Visit’ correct? But then the other field is called “visit type concept id” which seems to be redundant. The text description says that visit type concept id is the SOURCE of the data though. So would visit_type_concept_id be like “electronic medical record system” or something like that? Thanks!
It helps me to think of foo_type_concept_id as typically metadata usually about provenance, while foo_concept_id is typically a standardized representation of a clinical/organizational fact. That said, visit_concept_id is a bit of an outlier, in that it’s a really high-level abstraction of the visit, different from, say, condition_concept_id or procedure_concept_id, which are fairly granular. So I can see where one might get particularly confused by this pair.
I hope this helps.
Hi Ben:
The description is here:
http://www.ohdsi.org/web/wiki/doku.php?id=documentation:cdm:visit_occurrence
.
But perhaps best explained with an example:
VISIT_CONCEPT_ID tells you what kind of visit the patient went to,
currently 4 options: inpatient visit, outpatient visit, longterm care
visit, emergency room visit.
VISIT_TYPE_CONCEPT_ID is the provenence of the data, so it tells you how
you derived the visit: did it come from an administrative claims record,
or inferred from EHR entry, etc.
(note there is one other field that can be confusing: VISIT_OCCURRENCE_ID,
that’s just the row number of the table…)
Hope that helps. Happy hacking!