Clinical instrument specification

A declarative specification of a clinical outcome measure: its items, their admissible ranges and measurement level, its subscales, how items aggregate into scores, the direction of clinical benefit, and the interpretation strata.

Usage

# S4 method for class 'ClinicalInstrument'
show(object)

Arguments

object

A ClinicalInstrument.

Slots

id

Short unique identifier (e.g. "berg").

name

Human-readable name.

version

Specification version string.

items

Character vector of item identifiers, in order.

item_ranges

Named list; each entry a length-2 numeric c(min, max) for the corresponding item.

item_type

Character vector (recycled to the item count) of "interval" or "ordinal".

subscales

Named list mapping each subscale name to a character vector of its item identifiers; length 0 for single-scale instruments.

aggregation

"sum" or "mean".

direction

"higher_better" or "higher_worse".

strata

List of interpretation bands, each a list with label, lower and upper.

item_values

Optional named list; for an item with a discrete (possibly non-integer) admissible value set - e.g. the Modified Ashworth 1+ = 1.5 - the numeric vector of allowed values. Items absent from the list are validated only against item_ranges / item_type.

item_recode

Optional named list; for an item whose raw responses are recoded before scoring (e.g. the SF-36 0-100 recode, or a reversed item), a named numeric map from the raw response (a character key) to the scored value. Applied after validation, before aggregation.

source_ref

Citation / provenance string.