I got a great question from @Eldar today . . .
In some databases we can have information about patient readmission to hospital after surgery admission
that we would like to store in CDM.
I think of using visit_occurrence.preceding_visit_occurrence_id , that can be filled with visit_occurrence_id of
corresponding surgery admission visit. This way seems elegant but I’m not sure
that it’s correct as due to CDM documentation it can be used to link a visit IMMEDIATELY preceding.
So, lets say we have sequence of visits 1,2,3,4, where 1 is a surgery admission visit, 4 readmission visit,
2 and 3 are some other visits happened between 1 and 4 and are not related to surgery admission visit.
Is it legit for visit 4 to use preceding_visit_occurrence_id = 1 to link primary admission with readmission?
I would have thought it was okay to use VISIT_OCCURRENCE.PRECEDING_VISIT_OCCURRENCE_ID in the way Eldar explains - surgery happens (VISIT 1) and they are readmitted later (VISIT 2 - linked to VISIT 1). However based on the definition of this column this would not be correct.
Could we use the column in the way Eldar explains or would this introduce inconsistencies in how this column is used?
Tagging @clairblacketer, @Christian_Reich, @mvanzandt