We represent a person’s care journey over time in the visit_occurrence table of the OMOP common data model.
Based on the documentation here, a record in the visit_occurrence should represent “span’s of time a person continuously receives medical services from one or more providers at a care_site in a given setting within a health care system”. So the unit of representation (or record) in visit_occurrence becomes a unique combination of person + care_site + continuous care time-span.
According to the conventions and the table definition in the page above, there is a point of contention: Question to the group is “One visit may involve multiple Care Sites, in which case the ETL must specify how a single care_site id is selected or leave the care_site_id field null.” Is this convention valid?
Reason: Given that the unit of representation of the record is unique combination of person + care_site + continuous care time-span; i.e. is it possible to have multiple care_site per visit? Also see care_site is the unique combination of location_id (geographic location) and place_of_service_concept_id, and is the lowest level of representation of a physical unit at a facility.
How have others handled these? Are there any scenarios for multiple care_sites?
There has been several threads that has discussed related topics such as visits, encounters, services etc. This thread is only trying to collect use-cases on how others in community have handled visit and care_site during their ETL, in preperation to this proposal