Time to weigh in on fuzzy dates. We have been using fuzzy dates at Duke and in TMR since the early 70s for just the reason Sam states. Often patients will know on;y the year, more frequently the month and year only but no date. We discover that partial data is much more useful than no data.
So we used fuzzy dates. The fuzzy dates are displayed with ?? for the unknown parts. Whenever we sort, a fuzzy day sorts to the 15th of the month, and a fuzzy year sorts to July. Statisticians are generally unhappy with fuzzy dates and want to throw them out. But every one seems happy when someone records the date of onset for hypertension as July 4, 1976. Where is the hour, minutes and seconds. I argue that fuzzy dates are acceptable and valid data points and should be used in statistical analysis. In a datetime stamp, unknowns are stored as 00. Thank goodness, we use another saymbol for a totally unknown date. Ed Hammond - If you have any questions about using this list, please send a message to d.lloyd at openehr.org
