Pharmacologic agents used in the diagnosis, cure, mitigation, treatment, or prevention of disease.

Data Element

Reported Medication (unique)
Description

“Indicates if this record was captured as a secondary 'reported' record rather than as an original primary source-of-truth record.” (from FHIR R4 MedicationRequest.reported[x]). This would clearly identify a medication that only exists in the data system not as part of any direct data for an original prescription (within the same EHR or across an EHR network, etc) but, instead, via descriptive communication or narrative (verbal, written, etc) by a relevant person (the patient, family, a caregiver, another physician, etc.) This may either be represented as a simple Boolean choice or, additionally, include information of the person and/or nature of the reporting. Additionally, some standards and system implementations provide more than one location for this type of information – and different options are used by different implementations resulting in highly non-standardized usage of this critical information. Proposal is that this information is captured ONLY in one way, universally across systems.

Comment

The lack of consistency in…

  • The lack of consistency in how an "asserted" or "reported" medication is only growing.  MedicationStatement (and MedicationUsage in FHIR R5) is often used as a destination for this, meanwhile US Core puts asserted medication records as a qualifier in MedicationRequest, while Europe (via the International Patient Summary FHIR IG) seems to be also pushing MedicationStatement.
  • To be clear - my point is not what the correct place is to put reported medications.  My point is there needs to be ONE agreed-upon way to represent a Reported/Asserted medication and everyone use it.  Without that the concept of reported medications in EHRs remains a bit of a zoo a variations with no hope for interoperability

 

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