Representing both short and long description in Coding

How can we represent multiple descriptions for a single vocabulary concept code? Some code systems contain both a short and long description for concept codes. For example, in ICD-10 the code K35.8 has a short description of “Acute appendicitis, other and unspecified” and a long description of “Acute appendicitis without mention of localized or generalized peritonitis”. The Coding.display element only has cardinality 0…1 so there doesn’t appear to be a place to put multiple different descriptions.

Coding.display is not intended to represent multiple definitions. It’s a single text that can be displayed by a system that doesn’t recognise the code, and to help a human doing debugging. So you’d pick one- the shortest, usually. Code System supports multiple designations

1 Like