Saturday, November 28, 2009

Code versus Id

Why is it so difficult to see the difference between code and id?
Even in standards they mix the two. RFC3881, a standard for Audit Messages in Healthcare Applications used in NEN7513 and IHE ATNA, uses it wrong. Specificaly on EventID were the attributes are CodeSystem, etc, so it should be called EventCode.
In the ISO Datatypes used in HL7 there are two datatypes, namely II (Instance Identifier) and CD (Concept Descriptor).
I think the distinction is clear. There are codes for kinds of animals, and each animal has its own id in the form of a name. So my cat(==code) her name(==id) is Michi.
That's all folks.