Page Comparison

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Data Model

Definitions

• Visit: encompasses one or more encounters to describe an event where the patient has interacted with the healthcare system.  Visits may occur within minutes/hours or may extend over days, weeks, or even months (for an extended hospitalization).  Examples of visits include an outpatient (clinic) visit, a hospitalization, or a visit to the lab.  In many cases, the patient is physically present; however, this might not always be the case: in the case of a telephone "visit" the physician calls the patient and writes a note and/or some orders as a result; for a documentation "visit" the provider may simply be writing some orders based on labs received between clinic visits.  For billing-related systems, the "visit" is typically where the account number would fit.
• Encounter: is a "clinical transaction" in which a group of data (e.g., observations, notes, and orders) are recorded.  Encounters generally happen at a point in time and involve one (or a few) providers.  Examples include the paper "encounter form" with which OpenMRS started, an order entry session, a daily note & associated orders written for patient while they are in the hospital, etc.
• Visit type: represents the assortment of visits available to an implementation.  These could include items like "Initial HIV Clinic Visit", "Return TB Clinic Visit", and "Hospitalization".
• Visit "class": allows for categorization of visit types into INPATIENT vs. OUTPATIENT vs. EMERGENCY.  The intent of this is to provide something similar to HL7's PV1-2 "Patient Class" (see codes in Notes)

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Requirements

• Visit.location should be optional (nullable)
• A visit may exist without any encounters
• An encounter may exist without a visit
• Start with visit class as enum (INPATIENT, OUTPATIENT, EMERGENCY, NOT APPLICABLE, UNKNOWN).

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