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Class steward is Patient Care
According to Webster’s dictionary, a specimen is "an individual, item, or part considered typical of a group, class, or whole" or "a portion or quantity of material for use in testing, examination, or study." In the practice of clinical medicine and especially in previous HL7 specifications, specimen was tightly related to the container which holds the specimen. However, there is an important difference between a container and a specimen. Through the material class with roles for both specimen and container one can manage containers separately from specimen. With the same class one can manage empty specimen containers (material management) the same way as the container filled with specimen.
Body site has been retained as an attribute of the specimen, since it may be relevant in some cases, e.g., if multiple liver needle biopsies are taken from different lobes and locations of the liver. The value of the Specimen.body_site_cd should be identical to the value of the Service.body_site_cd of an associated specimen collection service. This attribute therefore is used only if such an associated specimen collection service is not communicated. When the rule is to always send a specimen along with a record of the specimen collection service, this attribute needs not be valued.
OpenIssue: Should this be a subtype instead of a role relationship?