Why are so many men pregnant? Data entry mistakes in the health industry

Have a table for people and then two tables for 'females' (defined as capable of pregnancy) and 'others'. The two tables link back to the people table with an fkey and each person from the people table has their own row in the applicable table. Then have a 'pregnant' table with an fkey back to 'females' table and a boolean column. Edit: or just the boolean column in 'females' table as danielmiller suggested

This is of course ridiculous so you should just use triggers or application layer, that's how logical data restrictions are meant to be enforced.

danielmiller3• 14 years ago

If you feel resentful toward your coworkers or are planning on quitting your job soon:

You could have Male, Female, and Transgendered tables, each of which point back to the Patient table. Only the Female table (and perhaps the Transgendered table) would have an isPregnant column.

ak394• 14 years ago

Lol! But, will this work? How do we ENFORCE mutually exclusive Male, Female & Transgendered records for ONE Patient record?

rmc4• 14 years ago

'Transgender'? You know that's not just one big lump of people? There are trans women and trans men. Also it would inaccurate (and possibliy) illegal to refer to a trans man as anything other than male in some cases (ditto for trans women).

olavk2• 14 years ago

Check constraints. But DB constraints seems like the wrong level to fix the problem. If it happens often that an non-pregnant person is registered as pregnant, then it might happen with women as well as men. Perhaps even more often! This can't be fixed at the DB level. My guess is that it is some kind of UI issue.

gaius3• 14 years ago

Yes it can. Remember that in any non-trivial system, there is no "UI". There are web apps (there may be dozens of these alone), desktop client-server apps, terminals, interfaces to other systems (which in turn may be many protocols, file formats, etc). There may be 30+ years between the oldest and the newest app, and hundreds or thousands of developers working in everything from COBOL to C++ to Python involved throughout that time. All talking to the same database. You want the same rules to apply to all of them, so have the DB enforce them, job done.

The webdev world, where there is 1 app in 1 language written by 1 team talking to 1 DB and that's as complex as that bit of the system architecture will ever get, doesn't have any techniques that can cope with this kind of environment.

rmc4• 14 years ago

You can do that and that will take care of the "pregnant man" case, but it won't stop a hospital from accidentally recording all births as still births, or other mistakes.

Some things that might seem like mistake aren't mistakes, e.g. people over 18 having pædiatric procedures (e.g. undecended testes is often caught shortly after birth and an orchidopexy is often done in pædiatric wards, but if it was undetected and ignored, for 20 years a 20 year old might need it.).

It's hard to solve a people problem with technical solutions.

robgough• 14 years ago

Before anyone get's too excited, note that according to a comment on the same article 96% of those men where under 1 week old - and thus legitimately males with midwife episodes.

edit: apologies, that was from a comment on the article.

DanBC• 14 years ago

As a cultural note: hospitals have to code stuff, they are then paid by a Primary Care Trust based on the coding. Thus, there's a financial incentive to mis-code, or to "code harder". This is, obviously, fraud and the NHS fraud unit investigates and punishes it.

The other worry is that this data is potentially used for clinical research, so let's hope people know about the error rates.

Why are so many men pregnant? Data entry mistakes in the health industry

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