Stream: implementers
Topic: How to represent original units
Felix Chapman (Nov 09 2021 at 16:10):
I was wondering how to represent an observation where we want to store multiple units for the same quantity/range.
Our use case is alcohol: we have the original location-dependent alcohol units/standard drinks and also converted to a canonical format of grams of alcohol.
I had some ideas, but not sure if any are right:
- Store multiple Observations (this creates technical challenges for us because they are dependent on each other, e.g. if one is amended)
- Store an Observation with multiple components (but this feels like an abuse of what "component" means)
- Create an extension
Mike Lohmeier (Nov 09 2021 at 20:47):
Is there a reason you couldn't standardize internally on a unit of measure and compute the changes of unit of measure on a per request basis based on your i18n? E.G. store everything as grams internally and then convert to ounces if a user passes in an Accept-Language header value of en-US
Felix Chapman (Nov 10 2021 at 09:41):
We plan to do that kind of thing as well, but we're also interested in knowing the original units as-inputed by the patient.
Lloyd McKenzie (Nov 15 2021 at 04:40):
There's a standard translation to capture Quantity translations: http://hl7.org/fhir/extension-iso21090-pq-translation.html
Felix Chapman (Nov 15 2021 at 16:57):
Thanks Lloyd, that looks like exactly what I need!
Last updated: Apr 12 2022 at 19:14 UTC
