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Printables and workbook

Everything on this site is free and stays free. This page describes the printed companions, which exist for people who learn better away from a screen and want something they can write in.

Why print at all

Two reasons, and neither is about the material being different.

The first is pace. A website invites reading at the speed of scrolling, and this material does not reward that. The transformation is a sequence of decisions, and the useful thing to do with each decision is stop, consider what it costs, and write down what you would choose. A page with room to write asks for that. A screen rarely does.

The second is that a lot of people learning this are learning it under pressure, often after being handed a FHIR endpoint and a research question in the same week. Reading a specification while anxious is unproductive. Working through one page a day with a pen is a different experience, and for many people it is the difference between finishing and abandoning.

The Companion Guide

A print-ready reference covering the whole curriculum in condensed form. It is the site distilled to the parts you look up rather than the parts you read once.

Contents:

  • The full concept and domain reference, including the routing decision procedure as a one-page flow
  • Field-level mapping tables for the eight tables you build most often, with the required columns marked
  • The vocabulary chapter as a working reference, including reading an Athena page and the Maps to chain
  • The four visit construction patterns with their parameters
  • The medication type concept assignments across all four resources
  • The observation period derivation options with what each one represents
  • A glossary of the words that mean two different things depending on which community is speaking
  • The ETL documentation checklist, all thirteen rows
  • The handoff checklist, all fourteen items

Format: letter and A4, formatted to print double-sided and sit in a binder without reformatting.

Who it is for: someone building a pipeline who wants the decisions and reference tables in one place, on a desk, next to a laptop that is already showing three other things.

The Workbook

A six-week slow-learning workbook, one page per day, built for confidence rather than coverage.

Each page holds one idea, a worked example, room to write, and a single question to answer. Some pages ask you to trace a code through a mapping chain. Some ask you to draw the encounter structure of a hospital stay. Some ask you to write down, in your own words, what a decision costs a future researcher, which is the exercise that produces the most durable understanding and the one nobody assigns.

How it is built:

  • Week 1: Shapes. What each standard is, what it refuses to represent, and the four seams between them
  • Week 2: Vocabulary. Concepts, domains, source and standard, and the routing decision procedure
  • Week 3: People and time. PERSON, VISIT_OCCURRENCE, VISIT_DETAIL, and the observation period problem
  • Week 4: Clinical events. Conditions, the measurement and observation split, and medications
  • Week 5: What the source did not give you. Derived tables, the seven inventions, and provenance
  • Week 6: Making it defensible. Quality, documentation, governance, and the handoff

The running example is the same one used across the site, a synthetic person whose record is deliberately imperfect. By the end of the workbook you will have mapped that record by hand, found every problem in it, and written down what you would do about each one.

There is deliberate white space. Pages have room to doodle, to draw the graph as you understand it, to be wrong on paper. Diagrams appear twice, once complete and once blank for you to fill in. This is a feature and not padding.

Who it is for: someone who wants to actually learn this rather than get through it. Graduate students. Physician researchers moving into informatics. Anyone who has read the specification twice and still does not feel like they could defend a mapping decision out loud.

Free printables

These are on the site and always will be, no purchase, no email address:

The domain routing card. One page. The six-step decision procedure for choosing an OMOP table, with the four options for an unmapped source code. Print it and put it near the monitor.

The medication type concept card. One page. The four FHIR medication resources, the type concept each gets, and what evidence each one actually carries about whether the drug entered the person.

The words that mean two things sheet. Two pages. The vocabulary collisions between the FHIR and OMOP communities, in a form you can put in front of a room before a joint meeting and prevent an hour of confusion.

The handoff checklist. One page, fourteen items. What has to be true before an instance goes to anyone else.

How the free and paid parts relate

The site teaches. The printed companions are for practicing and for reference.

Nothing in the guide or the workbook is withheld from the site. Every concept, every table, every decision is written out in full in the chapters, and the five tools are free and always will be. If you never buy anything here you will still be able to build a defensible pipeline, and that is the point of the site existing.

What the printed versions add is form. A binder reference is a different object than a website, and a six-week workbook is a different experience than twenty chapters you could read in an afternoon and retain about a third of. Some people want that and some do not, and both are reasonable.

Availability

The printables are available through ThePreparedPage. Links go here once the listings are live.

If you are a student, an advocacy organization, or working on a rare condition with no budget, write to me. There has never been a case where that conversation ended badly.