All messages should be posted in plain text. HTML will be converted to attachments. The meditech-l web site is MTUsers.com ======================================
Robert and Donald, I wholeheartedly agree that we need an additional index. I have been asked to run a report for notes a user entered on a specific date, and the report takes way too long. For example: The user calls and says they KNOW they entered a note for a patient, and the KNOW it filed, but it isn't there. The answer is that they probably entered it on the wrong account number. I have to search every note in the system to determine if it was entered by that user, on that date. Indices are cheap. Meditech provides a lot more than they used to, but this is one example of an opportunity waiting. Brian ------------------------------------------------------------------------ ----------------------- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Robert White Sent: Thursday, May 18, 2006 5:24 AM To: [email protected]; Donald Stewart; Bill Mullins Subject: RE: [MEDITECH-L] NUR.NOTE All messages should be posted in plain text. HTML will be converted to attachments. The meditech-l web site is MTUsers.com ====================================== Donald - I'm going to post this to the L since there are others involved in this discussion and hopefully Meditech will pay attention. A relational database would not be set up as the NUR.NOTE indexes are set up, and additionally the bulk of Meditech indexes are not set up in this manner. Suppose this (and the situation gets worse as notes are more robustly used): 1) You have 10,000 patients who have 1 or more notes 2) You enter 5 notes for today on 5 different patients 3) You write an NPR report to list notes for a specific date Seems reasonable, right? And since you are interested in notes for a particular date you use the index note.x - the NPR name when you do a lookup on the index field is nur.note.date.x - and on your screen you have a prompt PRINT NOTES FOR DATE: - and the user enters T and runs the report. The note date index physically is :NOTED[aa,nod,etc] - where aa is the patient urn, nod is the date of the note, and etc are subsequent subscripts. When you run this report the primary (first subscrpt) loop will be on aa. This means that the report will look at all 10,000 patients in the index first, and then, for each patient, it will look at the date. This is really not an index at all! It amounts to the same thing as running through the entire main database of patients (the main database is ?NOTE[aa]) and doing a check on date EQ mydate (the date I entered to search for). The same is true for the category index. Had Meditech coded this index correctly it would have been :NOTED[nod,aa,etc]. In this case - when the report is run - it would look at only 5 records rather than 10,000 records. That's a significant difference. And, I would offer, the programming/database concepts applied are amateurish. >>> "Stewart, Donald" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> 05/17/06 3:15 PM >>> The notes are all tied to individual patients. So patient is the primary key and depending on the index, category, etc. are secondary, tertiary, etc. keys. A relational database would actually be set up similar. I have written several reports in NUR.NOTE and the indexes seem to work fine. Use the index that has the field(s) you want to select on or sort on closest to the beginning. Just having a field indexed makes a tremendous difference. I have many reports that there are suitable indexes and they take 'forever' to run, especially in BAR and ABS. Donald -----Original Message----- From: Robert White [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Wednesday, May 17, 2006 2:13 PM To: Stewart, Donald Subject: RE: [MEDITECH-L] NUR.NOTE Donald - given a note category and date range I'd like to print out patient notes (new page for each patient). The indexes all start with patient (aa). So to get at the selected data (category and date range) I would have to loop through every patient who has had notes. The indexes (NUR.NOTE) should really be turned around: For date index -> [date,aa,etc] instead of [aa,date,etc] For category index -> [cat,aa,etc] instead of [aa,cat,etc] In my view this is a major design flaw. I have looked all over and there does not seem to be an appropriate index. >>> "Stewart, Donald" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> 05/17/06 12:55 PM >>> Hi Robert, What are you trying to do? Donald F. Stewart Sr. Programmer Analyst Upson Regional Medical Center 801 W. Gordon St. Thomaston, GA 30286 (706)647-8111 x1696 [EMAIL PROTECTED] <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Robert White Sent: Tuesday, May 16, 2006 9:18 AM To: [email protected] Subject: [MEDITECH-L] NUR.NOTE All messages should be posted in plain text. HTML will be converted to attachments. The meditech-l web site is MTUsers.com ====================================== I am looking at the index files for NUR.NOTE and they all begin with patient (aa) as the first subscript. This means that for a particular date range or note category one would have to loop on all the patients who have notes - not a very good design. Is there some other index I have missed? I did check NUR.PAT and I did not see anything there. _______________________________________________ meditech-l mailing list [email protected] http://mtusers.com/mailman/listinfo/meditech-l
