Biomedical Concept Surrogates

[pendingintent]

Not a lot of Biomedical Concepts have been created in the CDISC Library. Currently, there are only 1127 concepts defined. These codes will not cover all required by a protocol.

To support using Biomedical Concepts in USDM that have yet to be defined in teh CDISC Library, the idea of Biomedical Concept Surrogates was included in the Implementation Guide. Section 4.13 states "Surrogate BCs are a
placeholder mechanism for when a BC definition is not available. This allows the name of a test to be specified but
no further detail need be provided. Surrogates can contain a name and description pair for the concept required. A
reference field is also provided to allow for links to reference materials (e.g., a URL for an external resource)".

I am currently creating a schedule of activities in the SOA Workbench for an oncology study that includes procedures for whcih no definintions exist in teh CDISC Library. The concepts are included in the NCIt, so I include the name and description from NCIt along with the URL as the referenceId.

Biomedical Concept Surrogates is a feature that is now included in local deployments of the SOA Workbewnch and will be included in a future tagged release.

It has been mentioned that this feature is left over from earlier versions of USDM and that it was not intended for use. I need to define a complex oncology trial and since the ceoncepts I require for oncology (specifically breast cnacer) are not included in the CDISC Library, I need to support the concept fo a "palceholder" biomedical concept in my USDM definition.