We discussed how clinical data has simple entities but complex relationships.

Now that we are learning about data types, please post an example of how a data type choice for a particular data element may have significant impacts to clinical systems and possibly impact patient care.

Hints may be issues surrounding things like truncation, international /language impacts, numeric precision, sorting and ordering, case sensitivity. And null behavior.

For example, ask “What type of data type is best suited for data element XYZ?” where xyz could be a patient name , date of birth, or medication name, or lab result text etc.

You could say, For patient first name, I would choose a string data type of (pick one or any valid data type: char(100), varchar(200) , nvarchar(50), ntext, float) and explain why.

Making the connection between SQL and informatics impacts…

Please see attached slides and other student’s post