Symptom

Symptom represents an indication that a person has a condition or disease. Some examples are headache, fever, fatigue, nausea, vomiting, and pain. Also, symptoms are subjective manifestations of the disease perceived by the patient. As an example to differentiate symptom from finding, the patient's subjective symptom of fever is distinguished from the temperature (a finding). A finding could reference a temperature-measuring device and a recorder. The recorder could be the device (with electronic data capture) or an individual (healthcare provider, patient, etc.). Note that while many symptoms are entered as findings as part of assessments and, therefore, may not be included in a specific EHR "symptom" section, QDM 5.5 retains the QDM datatype, "Symptom", for clarity of expression in the human readable eCQM.