Dependencies: core, diagnoses

The module's purpose is to document patients risk factors for certain diseases, ranging from family history over biomarkers to individual lifestyle and occupational risk factors. It helps the standardized documentation also by providing the definition for each risk factor (e.g. what age is typically thought to be “normal” for a cardiovascular event and therefore not considered a risk factor). The module can then also provide this information to other modules that implement risk calculators (e.g. HASBLED, CHA2DS2-VASc,…) or include these calculators itself.

A separate documentation of risk factors apart from diagnosis may prove useful to better structure the data, to better separate disease from risk factors also in the communication between patient and provider and to avoid overflow with unnecessary information when possible.

Examples for risk factors:

• Lifestyle: Smoking status, including packyears (packs of cigarettes per day times years smoked) and exposure to passive smoke
• Family history: e.g. cancer at early age, cardiovascular disease (CVD) at early age,…
• Special risk factors: e.g. consanguinity of parents
• Biomarkers: e.g. LipoproteinA for CVD
• Genetic risk factors: e.g. HLA-B27 for auto-immune disease
• Occupational risk factors: known exposure to irritants/toxic agents/radiation,… sedentory occupation may be included as well.

Risk factors are included in diagnostic classifications like ICD-10 or ICPC-2, but usually not in a granularity to be the used for individual risk assessment, rather to document its outcome.

Researching already existing catalogues or documentation standards for risk factors is necessary!

• Draft
• Specification
• API