It's fairly common to ask questions about time in relationship to now. Have you had a mammogram in the last 12 months? What medications was the patient given today? What are the labs for the last 30 days. Can we schedule a visit for a month from now?
When a date query is expressed in the form of a simple quantity, there are two pieces of information given: A value, and a unit of measure in duration. When expressed as FHIR queries, a date and a simple quantity are quite readily discernible. Dates have -, : or T punctuation in them. Simple quantities have units and | punctuation.
So I decided to try this out mentally. One of the challenges is dealing with precision. If someone asks me what I've did last month, I'm thinking June. If they ask me what I've done in the last month, mentally I'm thinking July and the end of June, because I mentally translate to 30 days or so. But then if they ask me what I was doing more than a month ago, I go back to thinking in one month chunks, so before June.
I decided that units specified in the query would also specify the units of precision.
I adopted the convention that a date query parameter named "date" would have an alternate way of specifying it using the name "date-fromnow".
So, if you query from date-fromnow=le-1||a what you would be asking is "what happened in the year before the last one." That's equivalent to date=le2016. If you wanted more precision, you could ask in months or days (weeks are a bit messy, so I didn't deal with them). Thus, date-fromnow=le-12||mo means date=le2016-07. And date-fromnow=le-365||d means date=le2016-07-05.
Good enough. Time to go implement this and see how it pans out.
Keith
P.S. For what it's worth, this is quite useful to implement some of the guidance in the Relevant and Pertinent work that was done=-1||a.
When a date query is expressed in the form of a simple quantity, there are two pieces of information given: A value, and a unit of measure in duration. When expressed as FHIR queries, a date and a simple quantity are quite readily discernible. Dates have -, : or T punctuation in them. Simple quantities have units and | punctuation.
So I decided to try this out mentally. One of the challenges is dealing with precision. If someone asks me what I've did last month, I'm thinking June. If they ask me what I've done in the last month, mentally I'm thinking July and the end of June, because I mentally translate to 30 days or so. But then if they ask me what I was doing more than a month ago, I go back to thinking in one month chunks, so before June.
I decided that units specified in the query would also specify the units of precision.
I adopted the convention that a date query parameter named "date" would have an alternate way of specifying it using the name "date-fromnow".
So, if you query from date-fromnow=le-1||a what you would be asking is "what happened in the year before the last one." That's equivalent to date=le2016. If you wanted more precision, you could ask in months or days (weeks are a bit messy, so I didn't deal with them). Thus, date-fromnow=le-12||mo means date=le2016-07. And date-fromnow=le-365||d means date=le2016-07-05.
Good enough. Time to go implement this and see how it pans out.
Keith
P.S. For what it's worth, this is quite useful to implement some of the guidance in the Relevant and Pertinent work that was done=-1||a.
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