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The Findings About Events or Interventions structure, referred to as the FA Structure in this section, represents collected data about an event or intervention that cannot be represented within an event or intervention record or as a supplemental qualifier to such a record. The variable --OBJ is unique to the FA Structure and is used with FATESTCD to represent what the topic of the observation is. FATESTCD describes the measurement/evaluation and FAOBJ describes the event or intervention that the measurement/evaluation is about.

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When collected data will be represented in a qualifier variable and are represented in the FA domain, the name of the variable will be used as the value of FATESTCD (e.g., FATESTCD = "OCCUR" and FATEST = "Occurrence Indicator"). The use of the same names (e.g., OCCUR) for both qualifier variables in the observation classes and FATESTCD is deliberate, but should not lead implementers to conclude that the collection of such data (e.g., occurrence) must be stored in the FA domain. In fact, data should only be stored in the FA domain if they do not fit in the general observation-class domain. If the data describe the underlying event or intervention as a whole and share its timing, then the data should be stored as a qualifier of the general observation-class record. A record in FA may or may not have a parent record in an events or interventions domain. If an FA record does have a parent record, the value in FAOBJ should match the value in --TERM or --TRT, unless the parent domain is dictionary coded or subject to controlled terminology, in which case FAOBJ should match the value in --DECOD.

When to Use the FA Structure

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