Overview

What is a cohort?

A cohort  is defined as a group of people with a shared  or common statistical characteristic. 

In the medical field, cohorts typically refer to patients who share a specific characteristic(s) of data in their medical records.

For example, Patients may be grouped by their age group (say those aged between 13 and 18),  or height (say whose height between 165 cm and 180 cm). The list of patients who meet either the age or height criteria, could then be termed as belonging to these cohorts, respectively.

Different characteristics can also be brought together to define a cohort, which means that from our example, we could also build an entirely new cohort by combining both the age and height characteristics, with only patients that share both those characteristics.

What is the cohort-builder?

The cohort-builder open web app, is an OpenMRS tool used to generate reports as per the example on an ad hoc basis. This means that it builds a cohort of patients, based on the similarity of their characteristics.

The Source Code is hosted on GithubIt is built using ReactJS with JSX, Browsersync, Webpack, twitter bootstrap, HTML and Javascript.  The Source Code is hosted on Github(the link is in the Download section of this document). 

To get a feel of how it looks and works from an end user perspective,  visit the Cohort Builder Open Web App User Guide.

Why use cohort builder?

• It makes it easy to search for, and run saved report definitions or queries, for a given group of patients.

• It provides fluid transition between the search, result tabulation and the result view.

• It presents data in a well structured and readable format

• The cohort-builder presents the data in a very good format.