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