Medical events are the record of any medical actions taken to diagnose or treat the patient. These medical events capture all of the fields necessary to describe activities such as biopsies, surgeries pathology examinations, follow-up evaluations, medical histories, drug therapies, outcomes and complications, radiology procedures and treatments, radiation oncology treatments, medical oncology treatments, gastroenterology procedures, and palliative care to name a few.

A list of a patient's relevant medical events is maintained in the Medical Events List grid on the Medical Events tab of the patient detail window — see The Medical Events Tab (Patient Detail Window) for additional information about this grid. Every cancer group determines what types of medical events they are interested in tracking. The only medical events that will appear in the grid are those which have been added by your cancer group — see Cancer Group Medical Events Administration. Medical events which you add to the patient record will not be visible to users from other cancer groups.

Medical event records are very flexible. In some cases the information necessary to describe a medical event is covered by standard, predefined fields. In other cases, a cancer group may determine that there is additional information which they would like to collect about a particular kind of medical event and CCR (together with the Metabuilder tool) provides a flexible environment where this additional cancer group-specific data may be captured. See also The Metabuilder.

Medical events may be added manually for the cancer group, and they may also be linked to EDW "encounters", similar to the way samples can be linked to sample records in the BST database — see Linking an Encounter (Medical Event) from the Enterprise Data Warehouse to a Patient Record and Linking a Previously Unlinked Medical Event Record to an EDW Encounter. (Information about linking a sample record to BST can be found in Linking a Sample from itBioPath to a Patient Record.) EDW encounter records encompass a wealth of information from the electronic medical record about the procedures and treatments occurring over time for a patient. Some of these encounters are of interest to cancer group clinicians and researchers. They may describe important cancer related events, or the event may simply be important to establish a last known living date for the patient. In either case, the CCR system gives the user the capability to identify, link, and represent these encounters as CCR medical events.

Each cancer group also has the ability to enter or link to pathology reports of interest for their medical events — see Pathology Reports. In the user interface when a medical event is being entered or edited, the user is allowed to search the pathology report repository. If no match is found, the report can be entered directly from CCR. If, however, a matching report is found, it is linked to the medical event. After this link has been made (or the report entered), users viewing the information in CCR are given the option to view the pathology details. The pathology details can also be queried and reported on from within CCR.

Choose a medical event-related task below for instructions on how to perform that task: