Metrics: Complete

The code system can represent any vaccination that was given at anytime in the past, anywhere in the world, and to any person currently living.

A universally applicable system ensures that any individual's vaccination history can be integrated, regardless of the origin.

If NUVA continues to be updated with codes to represent all vaccine concepts currently coded, then it could be used as a baseline for determining if a code set is complete.

A code set is complete when it allows to represent accurately any existing vaccination record. “Accurately” could be interpreted as, at least, with the correct set of target diseases (otherwise a code system with a single code for “Any vaccine” would be considered as complete).

The approach could then be to consider within all identified possible vaccines records (that is, all NUVA codes) if some of them cannot be represented at all. For example, there is no ATC code to represent a Diphteria-Tetanus-Typhoid vaccine, although such a vaccine existed (it was administered to every young Frenchman during his military service).

Completeness differs from precision, that requires to be able to discriminate between concepts. A very limited code set could be quite complete, but highly unprecise. Reversely, a list of pharmaceutical codes used for logistics in a given country will be absolutely precise, but most likely very incomplete because it does not take into account historical vaccines nor vaccines administered in other countries.

The Python program described at nuva-utils computes the values for completeness and precision, based upon an alignment table between a given code system and NUVA codes. The description pages for each code (see Code systems) includes these values as computed from the currently known alignments.