Merge pull request #42 from jduteau/main

Updated the language for the Symptoms IG to reflect changes made to the guide.

Author: grahamegrieve

summaries/hl7.fhir.uv.symptoms.md

@@ -1,9 +1,7 @@
 # General
 
-This standard defines how patient-reported symptoms should be recorded and shared electronically across healthcare systems. When patients describe their health concerns—such as chest pain, dizziness, or fatigue—this standard ensures the information is captured in a structured, consistent format rather than as unstructured text notes.
+Symptoms are a major reason people seek care and are important for clinical diagnosis and treatment planning. However, symptom information is captured and shared in many different ways—free-text notes, coded data, checklists, questionnaires, and app-specific fields— by different organizations and systems.  This lack of consistency makes it difficult to exchange symptom data between different health systems and patient-facing applications. 
 
-The standard addresses the problem of symptom information being trapped in data silos or documented inconsistently, which can hinder effective sharing between providers and potentially lead to diagnostic errors. It provides specific FHIR profiles that break down symptoms into detailed components like severity, onset, duration, location, and quality.
+This implementation guide describes how patient-reported symptoms can be represented and exchanged in a standard way using HL7 FHIR. In this guide, “symptoms” refers to observations reported by patients or their caregivers about changes in health. This includes all symptoms (such as pain or fatigue) reported by patients as well as signs (such as a rash or swelling) that patients notice themselves.
 
-Healthcare IT developers use this standard to build EHRs, patient-facing applications, and clinical decision support systems. The standard requires systems to use FHIR APIs for exchanging symptom data and mandates support for specific search capabilities. It also defines how to explicitly record when patients deny having certain symptoms.
-
-Clinicians benefit by having access to structured, longitudinal symptom data at the point of care, supporting better diagnostic reasoning and reducing the need to repeatedly ask patients about their history. Public health agencies can use the standardized data for disease surveillance and outbreak detection. The standard integrates with major medical terminologies including SNOMED CT and LOINC to ensure consistent coding of clinical concepts.
+The guide provides standardized specifications (HL7 FHIR profiles) for representing and exchanging patient-reported symptoms and symptom features, such as severity, onset, timing, duration, location, quality, and related characteristics. The guide also specifies how to represent and exchange data about symptoms that are explicitly noted as absent (for example, when a patient reports they do not have fever or chest pain).