[Office Hours] HW1 Request for requirement clarification

[ChenaLee]

Related Discussion

1. What does it means for a medication to be completed? I don't think relying on datePrescribed is the right way, but I'm assuming that's what's expected in this assignment?
2. What defines a duplicated medication? Is it duplicated if med name(string) matches? or should dose match as well? e.g. pills are produced and sold at each dose level.

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[dusixian]

Based on my understanding, for the first question, I think you are right. Since we have the date of the medication, then given duration, we can compute when the medication is completed.
For the second question, same here, with more clarification needed.

[ChenaLee]

on #1, I'm guessing that's the intention in this assignment but it does not make sense in real life. e.g. I get 90day prescriptions for a medication but I usually don't pick up on the day it was prescribed or start taking it the day I pick up. Essentially there's no way to know when the patient started taking whatever they got and without the started-taking-med-date, duration is meaningless.

[vishnuravi]

You're absolutely right, and this is a challenge that real-world systems commonly deal with. This is why we routinely perform medication reconciliation, which is still a very manual process. For the assignment, we can simplify things to assume that the patient picked up and started taking the medication as instructed on the day it was prescribed.

[vishnuravi]

Hi @ChenaLee,

1. While the assignment uses a simplified model based on datePrescribed and duration, real-world healthcare systems track prescriptions with much more complexity. As you observed, a single medication often has multiple important dates: when it was prescribed by the doctor, when it was filled at the pharmacy, and when the patient actually started taking it. Prescriptions may also include refills that extend beyond the initial duration. For the assignment, using datePrescribed plus duration to determine completion is acceptable. However, if you're interested in learning more about how medications are modeled in actual healthcare systems, I'd encourage you to explore the Medications Module in the HL7 FHIR standard. You're welcome to try a more complex implementation if you have time!

2. For the purposes of this assignment, checking if the medication name (string) that is currently being prescribed matches the name of an active medication in the patient's medication list is a reasonable way to identify potential duplicates. In practice, you would likely want to compare the medication's code (e.g. RxNorm) rather than the string name for more precision, although coding the medications correctly is beyond the scope of the assignment. You've made a good observation that medications aren't always considered duplicates based just on name. A patient might legitimately take multiple different doses of the same medication in a day and that may be captured as separate prescriptions. Therefore, we would ideally want to consider other properties as well.

These are really thoughtful questions that show you're already thinking beyond the basic requirements to consider real-world software challenges! We'll explore these complexities more as the course progresses.