Determine the appropriate Namespace for integration assets

Background and Strategy

In Ursa Studio, most assets (objects, value sets, semantic mapping templates, etc.) must be assigned to a Namespace. Namespaces are text strings that identify the owner and scope of use of assets in Ursa Studio. For example, “URSA-CORE” is the Namespace used to identify all assets in the Core Data Model, which was developed by Ursa Health and represents a set of foundational “core” assets broadly useful for developing new analytics. Ursa Health will assign each organization a unique organization token (e.g., Ursa Health uses “URSA”) that should be used as the first part (e.g., the “URSA” in “URSA-CORE”) of any Namespaces they create.

A key purpose of Namespaces is to avoid collisions between assets with the same name within a single instance of Ursa Studio. In this way, different constituencies or projects – such as the integration of data from a particular source system – can freely name objects, create value sets, define terms, etc. without worrying about the possibility of a naming collision with another group. For example, two different units within the same organization might have two different ways of defining the term “High-Risk Patients”; as long as those units use different Namespaces, it’s possible for both terms to exist in the same instance of Ursa Studio.

Namespaces are also used to ensure asset name uniqueness in Ursa Studio's module export / import functionality, which uses a central cloud-based repository to store assets from different organizations. (Module export / import is used by organizations to share logic with other Ursa Studio customers, but is also used within an organization to ship logic from one instance of Ursa Studio to another -- e.g., from a development instance to production.)

For assets associated with the integration of data, the relevant scope of use is the source system from which the data originate. For example, assets that are part of Ursa Health’s integration module for CMS CCLF data uses the Namespace URSA-CCLF. It is recommended that each integration project use a distinct Namespace, to which all Ursa Studio assets used in the integration should be assigned.

Key Diagnostics / Heuristics

None.

Detailed Implementation Guidance

1. New Namespaces can be added in the Metadata Manager zone.

2. It is not currently possible to change a Namespace (i.e., the text value itself) once it has been created.

Examples

Example 1: Mixed clinical and claims data sources

HealthCo receives claims data from three payors (Cigna, Humana, and United), and generates data files from two internal systems: a vendor-provided EMR and a home-grown consumer-facing web portal branded as "PatientLink". The following Source ID values have been assigned to these five data sources:

CIG
HUM
UH
EMR
PL

HealthCo was assigned a unique organization token of "HC" by Ursa Health.

The following Namespaces are appropriate to use when creating assets in Ursa Studio associated with one of the five source systems listed above, respectively:

HC-CIG
HC-HUM
HC-UH
HC-EMR
HC-PL