Design Diagnosis DB

[Donna]

I am trying to design a db to hold:

Patients Name, general Patient info and diagnosis
information. I am fairly new at the db thing and just
needed someone to get me started. Each patient can have
numerous diagnosis'. I wanted to be able to enter the
data and select all the diagnosis the patient has. There
are also four diagnosis types, Axis 1-4. Will each
diagnosis have to be a separate record? I just need to
know how to start designing this db.

tia
donna

 

[John Vinson]

I am trying to design a db to hold:

Patients Name, general Patient info and diagnosis
information. I am fairly new at the db thing and just
needed someone to get me started. Each patient can have
numerous diagnosis'. I wanted to be able to enter the
data and select all the diagnosis the patient has. There
are also four diagnosis types, Axis 1-4. Will each
diagnosis have to be a separate record? I just need to
know how to start designing this db.

tia
donna

The first thing to check is whether you're sufficiently up on the
complex topic of database security to create a database that is
compliant with the stringent patient-privacy constraints of HIPAA. If
you don't know what HIPAA is... you'ld better find out; large lawsuits
are a lot more expensive than commercial databases!

That said... you should have three tables (at least):

Patients
PatientID
<biographical information>

Diagnoses
DiagnosisCode (such as the ICD-9 code)
Description

PatientDiagnosis
PatientID <link to Patients>
DiagnosisCode <link to Diagnoses>
<fields about this patient's diagnosis, e.g. confidence level,
severity, etc.>

I'm not sure how the "axes" relate to the diagnosis table.

John W. Vinson[MVP]
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