Opal Episodes

In Opal a Patient may have one or many Episodes. An Episode contains some metadata such as a start and end date, and the type of episode. This may be an inpatient stay, an outpatient treatment, a telephone consultation - or any other arbitrarily defined period of care.

Episode Categories

An episode must have a related category. An Opal EpisodeCategory is a discoverable subclass of opal.core.episodes.EpisodeCategory - such as InpatientEpisode, OutpatientEpisode or LiaisonEpisode.

You can access the current category of an episode via the category property, while it is represented in the database in the field category_name which will contain the display_name attribute of the relevant category.

episode = patient.episode_set.first()
print episode.category
# <opal.core.episode.InpatientEpisode object>

print episode.category.display_name
# "Inpatient"

print episode.category_name
# "Inpatient"

Detail templates

The category of an episode determines which template will be used to display it on the detail page for the patient. This template is determined by looking up the detail_template attribute of the EpisodeCategory.

episode.category
print episode.category
# <opal.core.episode.InpatientEpisode object>

print episode.category.detail_template
# detail/inpatient.html

Default Category

The default category of episodes in an Opal application is set by the OpalApplication object's default_episode_category property.

class Application(application.OpalApplication):
    default_episode_category = MyCategory.display_name

Episode stages

An Episode will frequently consist of a number of possible stages. For instance, for an inpatient episode, a patient will first be an inpatient, and then an be discharged, with an optional interim follow up stage for inpatients who have been discharged but requrie further follow up.

Opal stores the stage of an episode as a string in the stage property of an Episode. The valid possible stages for a category are accessed from the get_stages method of the category.

episode.category.get_stages()
# ['Inpatient', 'Followup', 'Discharged']

episode.category.has_stage('Followup')
# True

Defining your own EpisodeCategory

As EpisodeCategory is a discoverable we can define our own to meet custom requirements.

Episode categories should be defined in a file named episode_categories of your application or plugin.

# yourapp/episode_categories.py

from opal.core import episodes


class DropInClinicEpisode(episodes.EpisodeCategory):
    display_name = "Drop-in clinic"
    detail_template = "detail/drop_in.html"