Database Question

I'm developing a database to store patient data associated with hospital stays. Data includes diagnoses, medications,
surgeries, labs performed, infections, etc. This information will be tracked on a daily basis.

The physicians prefer to use checkboxes to document most of these attributes. For example, they've specified 10
common diagnoses and want these listed on a form with a checkbox for each. (They'll use an 11th checkbox and open
text field to document other diagnoses.) They request the same thing for medications: they've specified 8 broad classes
of medications - like Narcotics, Antiobiotics, etc. - and specific medications for each class. There's about 35 medications
in total. And so on.

Proper normalization would suggest I have tables like ...

tblPatients
-------------
PatientID (PK)
LastName
DOB
HospitalDayID

tblHospitalDays
-------------------
HospitalDayID
PatientID (FK)
HospitalDate
tblMedications
-----------------
MedicationID
HospitalDayID (FK)
Medication

tblDiagnoses
---------------
DiagnosesID
HospitalDayID (FK)
Diagnoses

etc.

... where there is one-to-many relationship between tblPatients and tblHospitalDays, and a one-to-many between
tblHospitalDays and each of the remaining tables. This way one patient can have many hospital days, and each day can
have many medications, diagnoses, etc. Better yet, I should probably have a junction table so that there is a many-to-
many between tblHospitalDays and tblMedications, tblHospitalDays and tblDiagnoses, etc.

If this is the best approach, how then would I simulate the look and feel of check boxes on the forms? This is a
screenshot of the kind of interface they want:

http://img220.imageshack.us/img220/6628/checkboxsx8.jpg

If I used continuous subforms with check boxes for each possible value (e.g., fsubMedications linked to frmHospitalDay
via HospitalDayID), how would I display multiple columns?
The second issue is that they plan later to export data into a statistical program for analyses. The best way to analyze
this kind of data is having a separate variable for each item (e.g., Medication1 with a value of True or False, Medication2
with a value of True or False, etc.) Data taken from properly normalized databases often need to be restructured into
non-normal schemes. Or perhaps there is way around this, too?

Any advice would be much appreciated.

Thanks.

Nov 21 2008, 04:24 PM

projecttoday
Post #2
Your patients table points to the hospital days table and your hospital
days table points to the patients table.

Seems like you need lookup tables to hold medications, diagnoses,

and patients.

Robert

UtterAccess VIP
Posts: 3,193
 From: Dunbar, WV

Nov 21 2008, 06:09 PM

heislek
w Post #3
QUOTE
UtterAccess
Addict Your patients table points to the hospital days table and your hospital days table points to the patients table.
Posts: 82

Seems like you need lookup tables to hold medications, diagnoses, and patients.

Robert

Whoops!

tblPatients should look like ...

-------------
PatientID (PK)
LastName
DOB

One patient can have one or more hospital days, and each day can have one or more medications, diagnoses, etc.
 Nov 21 2008, 06:37 PM

DougY
Post #4
Regarding your form:

I'm guessing Patient ID and the date of the stay are on the form somewhere as well...You may be better served by using an
unbound form. This will allow you to design the form without the restriction of the underlaying dataset (pretty much mimicking
Utterly Abby-
Normal the image you posted)... After the user selects the appropriate values want; you will push the data as records into the table
Posts: 8,791
assigning the proper FK values.
From: Seattle,
WA [USA]
Reports:

More time than not, you will end up denormalizing the data for reporting purposes. Either keeping it in a query(ies), or creating
a reporting table (depends on the volume of the data) to speed the response time.

--------------------

- Doug

When I said the program was fool proof, I hadn’t realized there were so many fools.

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