Core concepts

This page describes the major concepts related to the Ontology in Awell.

Resource type

A Resource type is the schema definition of a real-world entity, event, or functional intent. In FHIR, there are more than 150 resource types available to classify healthcare data.

Ontology	Example 1	Example 2
Resource type	Patient	Observation

Resource

A Resource refers to a single instance of a Resource type and thus corresponds to a single real-world entity, event, or functional intent.

Ontology	Example 1	Example 2
Resource type	Patient	Observation
Resource	John Doe's patient record	Hemoglobin measurement

Property and Property value

A property defines a specific characteristic of a Resource. It has a name which defines what that characteristic represents, and a value which defines what that characteristic is.

Note: in FHIR, properties are called Elements.

Ontology	Example 1	Example 2
Resource type	Patient	Observation
Resource	John Doe's patient record	Hemoglobin measurement
Property (name)	birthDate	valueQuantity.value
Property value	1993-11-30	7.2

Semantic properties

Some properties contain semantic information about a resource. This category of properties is referred to as a Semantic Property and is mostly frequently used when you want to search for data when designing care flows.

Let's say for example that you are building a care flow related to depression and want to create treatment activities that are relevant only for patients that are likely to be depressed. When you search for the term depression we can find the PHQ-9 Observation thanks to its code property as it contains information about what the observation measures (Loinc 44249-1: "PHQ-9 quick depression assessment panel").

Actionable properties

Some properties contain values that can be used to drive the logic in a care flow or tailor its content. This category of properties is referred to as an Actionable Property.

Building up on the previous example, once you've identified that the PHQ-9 observation has the information that you need, you can configure treatment activities that will only be activated when the observation value (Actionable Property of an Observation) is higher greater or equal to 10, which indicates a moderate or higher level of depression.

Reference

A Reference defines the relationship (or join) between two resources. Many of the defined properties in a Resource are references to other resources. Using these references, the resources combine to build a web of information about healthcare.

For example, the FHIR resource type Condition has a subject field of Reference type, which can be used to link to a Patient resource as the subject of the condition.

Data store

The collection of Resource types and Resources that describes all the healthcare data available in your account (the data layer). This evolves with the care flows that you build and the systems that you connect to Awell.

The structure of data storage can be reverse-engineered into the Ontology. This mapping can help in visualizing the correlation between the raw data and the Ontology framework, aiding in the understanding of data relationships and structure.

Data store (relational)	Data store (NoSQL)	Ontology
Table	Collection	Resource type
Row	Document	Resource
Column	Field	Property
Field	Value	Property value
Join	Linking	Reference

Data lineage

A visualisation that shows where the data comes from for a given Resource type and/or Resource.