Today there are several mechanisms in Atlas which provide cohort characterization: Heracles (adoption of Achilles for cohorts), Feature extraction (Generate w/ Features) and Cost & Utilization reports. All of them try to accomplish the same goal, but at the same time introduce extra complexity both to business users and developers since being placed in different parts of the application and doing their job in different ways. This is not obvious which to choose and which to extend during development. The suggestion is to provide a single mechanism which will support both current needs and be simply extendable by business users (ad-hoc) and developers.

The core idea is to re-use https://github.com/OHDSI/FeatureExtraction package by providing a user options either to select existing FE analyses, create analysis on the fly based on Criterias or raw SQL:

First thing is to provide a library of FE analyses and ability to create new ones:

When a user has available analyses, he/she can create a Cohort Characterization report by picking cohorts to analyze, analyses set and configuring the analyses parameters:

Database for such solution could look like:

DAO layer:

Service layer

Original discussion of the solution was held at Janssen R&D. Following contributors took participation

@pbr6cornell, @gowthamrao, Dave Kern, @chrisknoll, @pavgra.