Diagnoses

Medical diagnoses are grouped hierarchically. Each diagnosis may have set of subdiagnoses, which give more detailed description of the disease. Number of levels is unlimited. For example, the highest level diagnosis may be Cardiology disease, subdiagnoses of which would be: Bacterial Endocarditis, Angina, Cardiomyopathy, Congenital Heart Disease, etc. In turn, the Congenital Heart Disease would have subdiagnoses as: Aortic stenosis, Pulmonary stenosis, Coarctation of the aorta, etc.

Whenever some Rule of logic is matched against the items of a patient's Medical records the diagnosis of higher level will apply to all its subdiagnoses as well. For example, if some Rule says that EKG should be done for the patient with "Cardiology disease" the EKG would be automatically suggested for the patient with "Aortic stenosis" as the "Aortic stenosis" is in the "Cardiology disease" hierarchy. And on the contrary - if Rule of logic mentions some specific diagnosis it will apply only if this specific diagnosis is present in the patient's Medical Records. For example, the Rule may request to assign Persantine Cardiolite test for every patient who has got "Coarctation of the aorta". In this case this rule will not apply to the patient with "Cardiology disease" as a Cardiology disease is not necessarily the Coarctation of the aorta and this test was requested for this particular diagnosis only.

The Rules of logic use diagnoses in 2 ways: as conclusions and as arguments. They may either suggest some diagnosis in certain circumstances or they may take into account the presence of certain diagnosis in the Medical records while suggesting some further investigation.

See also: Diagnosis List