Patient Interests in FHIR - hl7-fhir

Is there a good place to store patient interests in FHIR? (e.g. enjoy bike riding, scuba diver, etc..) I am considering using an Observation to capture this, but I wanted to make sure there wasn't another option.

Observation is appropriate. It's a single point-in-time assertion.

Related

Handling typos / misspellings on list entities

What is the best practice approach to handle typos / misspelling on LUIS List Entities?
I have intents on LUIS which use a list entity (specifically Company Department - HR, Finance, etc). It is common for users to misspell this when putting forward their utterance. LUIS expects an exact match, it doesn't do a "smart" match, and therefore doesn't pick up the misspelled entity.
a) Using bing spell check is not necessarily a good solution. e.g. Certain departments are acronyms such as VRPA - and bing wont correct a typo there.
b) When I used LUIS a year ago, I would pre-process the utterance and use a Levenshtein distance algorithm to fix typos on list entities before feeding them to LUIS.
I would imagine that by now LUIS has some better out of the box way of handling this very common use case.
I'd appreciate input on what the best practice approach is to handle this.
#acambitsis and I exchanged messages via his UserVoice ticket, but I'm going to post the answer here for others.
A combination of Bing and Simple Entities might be what you're looking for, then (they're machine-learned).
I was able to accomplish something close and attached images.
In entities, I created a Simple entity with the role, VRPA. In intents, I created the Show Me intent and added sample utterances "Show me the VRPA" and "Show me the VPRA". I clicked on V**A and selected the Simple Entity:VRPA role. After training, I tried "show me the varp" and it correctly guessed "varp" was the "Simple:VRPA" entity.
You may also find RegEx entities useful. For acronyms, you could do something like: /[vrpa]/i and then any combination of VRPA/VPRA/VARP/ARVP would match.
I highly recommend reading through the Entity Types and Improve App Performance to see if anything jumps out to solve your particular issues.
This may not do exactly what you're looking for. If not, I'd recommend implementing a fuzzy-matching algo of your choice.
entities
intents

What's needed for NLP?

assuming that I know nothing about everything and that I'm starting in programming TODAY what do you say would be necessary for me to learn in order to start working with Natural Language Processing?
I've been struggling with some string parsing methods but so far it is just annoying me and making me create ugly code. I'm looking for some fresh new ideas on how to create a Remember The Milk API like to parse user's input in order to provide an input form for fast data entry that are not based on fields but in simple one line phrases instead.
EDIT: RTM is todo list system. So in order to enter a task you don't need to type in each field to fill values (task name, due date, location, etc). You can simply type in a phrase like "Dentist appointment monday at 2PM in WhateverPlace" and it will parse it and fill all fields for you.
I don't have any kind of technical constraints since it's going to be a personal project but I'm more familiar with .NET world. Actually, I'm not sure this is a matter of language but if it's necessary I'm more than willing to learn a new language to do it.
My project is related to personal finances so the phrases are more like "Spent 10USD on Coffee last night with my girlfriend" and it would fill location, amount of $$$, tags and other stuff.
Thanks a lot for any kind of directions that you might give me!
This does not appear to require full NLP. Simple pattern-based information extraction will probably suffice. The basic idea is to tokenize the text, then recognize/classify certain keywords, and finally recognize patterns/phrases.
In your example, tokenizing gives you "Dentist", "appointment", "monday", "at", "2PM", "in", "WhateverPlace". Your tool will recognize that "monday" is a day of the week, "2PM" is a time, etc. Finally, you can find patterns like [at] [TIME] and [in] [Place] and use those to fill in the fields.
A framework like GATE may help, but even that may be a larger hammer than you really need.
Have a look at NLTK, its a good resource for beginner programmers interested in NLP.
http://www.nltk.org/
It is written in python which is one of the easier programming languages.
Now that I understand your problem, here is my solution:
You can develop a kind of restricted vocabulary, in which all amounts must end witha $ sign or any time must be in form of 00:00 and/or end with AM/PM, regarding detecting items, you can use list of objects from ontology such as Open Cyc. Open Cyc can provide you with list of all objects such beer, coffee, bread and milk etc. this will help you to detect objects in the short phrase. Still it would be a very fuzzy approach.

Shortening a "Long" parameter list

I'm refactoring one of my projects - a shopping cart. One of the tightly coupled areas of my code is the "Viewer" class - to generate information for the user to see, it often needs a combination of two or more of the following objects:
The store catalog.
The customer's order.
The customer's mailing information.
I can't really break up the display methods, for various reasons.
Martin Fowler's Refactoring identifies this as a "Long parameter list" smell. The relevant refactoring here is "Introduce parameter object." I am, however, hesitant to do that, as doing so would couple loosely related data. It would also lock me to a very narrow one-to-one relationship between those three objects - while that would work for my application as it is now, it makes no real-world sense. (As there is only one store catalog, there can be many "Customer mailing information" objects, and each of those may be related to many "Customer's order" objects).
Does anyone have any elegant solutions to this?
A parameter list of three parameters needs no refactoring. Start worrying when you reach, say, 8 or 10 parameters.
Try to name the thing that binds a catalog, an order, and an address. Start, maybe with CatalogOrderAddressTuple. Ugly, isn't it? Well, maybe as a utility class of your Viewer, it should just be an inner class, where you could get by with just Tuple - or Data. Still ugly.
It doesn't sound like these belong as actual fields to the Viewer - but explore what that would look like, how your code would change if each Viewer were simply constructed with the data on which it operates.
As ammoQ & Ryan Prior have said, this isn't much of a smell, but I'd say it's worth playing with some alternatives before giving up entirely.
As stated by ammoQ, looking for refactoring opportunities with so few parameters is stretching.
See also: KISS and YAGNI.
It seems to me that introducing a parameter object would have the opposite effect of locking you to a one-to-one relationship between those three objects.
If a single customer address is being passed around, and in the future someone decides to separate billing address and shipping address, then it would probably be simpler to add the new address to a parameter object, rather than add a new parameter up and down the call stack.
(This is just an example, of course. Ideally, the address information would exist separately in the order and customer objects, since all information on posted orders should be immutable, even if the customer's address changes. But that wasn't what you were asking about!)

Detecting misspelled words

I have a list of airport names and my users have the possibility to enter one airport name to select it for futher processing.
How would you handle misspelled names and present a list of suggestions?
Look up Levenshtein distances to match a correct name against a given user input.
http://norvig.com/spell-correct.html
does something like levenshtein but, because he doesnt go all the way, its more efficient
Employ spell check in your code. The list of words should contain only correct spellings of airports.
This is not a great way to do this. You should either go for a control that provides auto complete option or a drop down as someone else suggested.
Use AJAX if your technology supports.
I know its not what you asked, but if this is an application where getting the right airport is important (e.g. booking tickets) then you might want to have a confirmation stage to make sure you have the right one. There have been cases of people getting tickets for the wrong Sydney, for instance.
It may be better to let the user select from the list of airport names instead of letting them type in their own. No mistakes can be made that way.
While it won't help right away, you could keep track of typos, and see which name they finally enter when a correct name is entered. That way you can track most common typos, and offer the best options.
Adding to Kevin's suggestion, it might be a best of both worlds if you use an input box with javascript autocomplete. such as jquery autocomplete
edit: danish beat me :(
There may be an existing spell-check library you can use. The code to do this sort of thing well is non-trivial. If you do want to write this yourself, you might want to look at dictionary trie's.
One method that may work is to just generate a huge list of possible error words and their corrections (here's an implementation in Python), which you could cache for greater performance.

How should I validate and manage a login namespace?

This is silly, but I haven't found this information. If you have names of concepts and suitable references, just let me know.
I'd like to understand how should I validate a given named id for a generic entity, like, say, an email login, just like Yahoo, Google and Microsoft do.
I mean... If you do have an user named foo, trying to create foo2 will be denied, as it is likely to be someone trying to mislead users by using a fake id.
Coming to mind:
Levenshtein Distance
Hamming Distance
You're going to have to take a two pass approach.
The first is a potential RegEx expression to validate that the entity name meets your specifications as much as possible. For example, disallowing certain characters.
The second is to perform some type of fuzzy search during the name creation. This could be as simple as a LIKE '%value%' where clause or as complicated as using some type of full-text search and limiting hits to a certain relevance rating.
That said, I would guess the failure rate (both false positives and false negatives ) match would be high enough to justify not doing this.
Good luck.

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