Health Record Editors

Introduction

Synthea has the concept of a HealthRecordEditor. This is a tool that is able to manipulate an individual's HealthRecord throughout the simulation. Editors differ from Synthea modules in that they are intended to only simulate actions that take place on an individual's electronic health record. They are not intended to be used to simulate physiological phenomena or any actions that the individual themselves would undertake.

An example of an editor is the GrowthDataErrorsEditor. This editor simulates errors that typically take place when manually entering observed heights and weights into an electronic health record system.

Execution in a Synthea Simulation

All HealthRecordEditors should register with the HealthRecordEditors class using the registerEditor method. HealthRecordEditors is a singleton class used to manage all HealthRecordEditors in a simulation.

At the end of each time step in a simulation HealthRecordEditors will iterate through its list of registered modules, calling the shouldRun method. This provides each HealthRecordEditor a chance to decide whether or not it should take action during the time step. As an example, the GrowthDataErrorsEditor only operates on individuals under 20 years of age. It will respond with false any time shouldRun is invoked and the individual is over 20 in the simulation.

If the shouldRun method returns true, HealthRecordEditors will invoke the process method to allow editing of the HealthRecord

Creating a Health Record Editor

Developers who want to create a new editor must implement the org.mitre.synthea.engine.HealthRecordEditor interface. All editors must be placed in the org.mitre.synthea.editors package.

As mentioned previously, new editors must register with the HealthRecordEditors class. It is good practice to allow new editors to be enabled via configuration. This means making the registration call in a code block that is controlled by a configuration property.