Reporting patterns and
Questionnaires
Ian McNicoll
openEHR Foundation /
Ocean Informatics
Do you smoke? Yes/No
If Yes …
• What do you smoke? Cigarettes | cigar | eCigs | pipe
• How much? ….. cigs per day
• When did you start? Dd/mm/yyyy
• What triggers you to start smoking?
• Did you stop after you discovered you were pregnant? Y/N
• Did you stop after you were scheduled for surgery? Y/N
• Do you use any other forms of tobacco?
Substance use pattern
Tobacco Use Summary
Detailed Tobacco Use (Diary)
Questionnaires are nasty...
Questionnaires
 What is a Questionnaire?
– “Did the patient have chest pain?”
 Where are they found?
– Data entry forms
• e.g. Emergency admission with chest pain
• Structured, efficient layout on screen, paper
• Act as a protocol
– Reporting
• Quality indicators
• Public health statistics
 Why are these so hard to model?
Questionnaire - example
FHIR Questionnaire
“There is considerable overlap between the information
covered by Questionnaires and other Resources
(especially FamilyHistory, MedicationStatement,
Observation, Procedure, etc.):
Questionnaire's flexible structure can easily be misused
to capture any data, even data that should be captured as
separate Resources.”
• http://hl7.org/implement/standards/fhir/questionnair
e.html
FHIR Resource
HL7 QRDA
Archetypical
• https://omowizard.wordpress.com/2014/02/21/thequestionnaire-challenge/
SHN Heart Failure Summary
• http://www.openehr.org/ckm/#showArchetype_1013.1.1416
Open-> Closed questioning?
• Tell me about your hair? “Hair is blonde”
• What colour is your hair? “Blonde”
• What colour is your hair?
Blonde|Brown|Black
• Are you a blonde? Y/N
Open->Closed
• Increasing constraint on the problem space
• Moves semantics from the Answer (value) to
the Question (name)
More Questions than answers
• Do we pay enough attention to the semantics
of questionnaires or is this ‘just a UI issue’?
• Can we assert
• h/o Diabetes = Yes
– equivalent to
• Past History of diabetes ?
• Can we develop a framework of Questionnaire
use to guide developers on the ‘Resource’ vs.
questionnaire issue?
Questionnaire - example