Inclusion of SNOMED to set additional Patient conditions #15
Description
To fully specify a Patient medical condition, a disease name and code are required, and we recommend using a coding system like
SNOMED.
To do this currently, the user would need to manually write the relevant SNOMED information into a Patient record entry inside of an Intelligence Layer interaction function.
An alternative to this would be to connect the Intelligence Layer to a SNOMED server. In this case, the Intelligence Layer could
contain functionality to generate a keyword and then use this keyword to query the SNOMED server, the response would then
automatically populate the Patient condition name and code fields.
It is very likely that the response would contain multiple codes for the same keyword (perhaps even codes for some other SNOMED entity types, e.g. procedures). A mechanism for selecting a single code would need to be implemented. This could be achieved by designing a process to filter out irrelevant codes. If there are multiple relevant codes (e.g. multiple codes for “long covid”) a probability distribution could be assigned to the codes and then a single one may be sampled.
A simpler version of this could be implemented if, say, it was known a priori that only a limited set of SNOMED codes might be
required. These could be preloaded from SNOMED and written to, for example, a python dictionary, and this is then made accessible to the Intelligence Layer.
If a SNOMED query resulted in multiple codes in the response, even though a single code would be selected for updating the patient record, it is still possible to store all these responses. This could be done by adding a patient attribute that tracks all these SNOMED codes (along with the query and other relevant parameters), these codes would then be stored with the patient and accessible at the end of the simulation. The codes could also be written to the logs. This raises a further option where the user could define an “event of interest”, namely, a condition such as “multiple SNOMED codes” that prompts a message to alert the user that this event has occurred during the simulation. This “alert” system would need to be implemented.