You're reviewing a first draft of the rules our trial-matching system uses to decide what to do when a patient's note doesn't explicitly mention something a trial criterion asks about — e.g. the trial requires "history of MI" but the note never mentions cardiac history. The wrong default either rejects patients who should have matched, or sends too many for needless in-person checks.
Your judgment goes straight into the next version of the matcher — the end product is a system you'd trust enough to use on your own patients. Disagree freely; that's the point of this pass.
What the three options mean (click to expand)
Each rule has two parts because criteria can be phrased either way ("patient must have X" vs "patient must NOT have X"). The two parts are set independently — pick the right rule for each side. They don't have to be inverses. For a safety-first category (a serious acute condition, say), silence on both sides may reasonably reject; for an informative-absence category, silence on the "must-have" side may reject while silence on the "must-NOT-have" side may pass through.