part of part of part_of immediately preceded by immediately_preceded_by disease outcome A processual entity that is either the outcome of a disease course or a part of a disease course and has etiological relevance. An event that happens during the course of a disease and that results from pathological processes that happened earlier in the disease. The infectious disease type in the XSD has a disease outcome element, which specifies whether someone became symptomatic, was hospitalized, etc. All of these outcomes require some process to occur. For sequalae of disease, it is that the realization of the disease is an etiological process that creates some other disorder. For example, fever is often occurs because of high levels of certain interleukins (which is a disorder). So I am comfortable with disease outcome as a process. It is also consistent with the probabilitistic information that will go with it, as a future probability is almost always (if not always) the probability of some event occurring (e.g., coin turning up heads, raining, developing a disease), diseaseOutcome William R. Hogan process disease course