Re: st: identifying re-operations from a list of operation codes and dates

[Nick Cox <njcoxstata@gmail.com>]

Paradoxically, or otherwise, there is a lot of detail to absorb here,
yet you may be suppressing part of the story to keep it as simple as
possible. We lose either way.

Assuming that e.g. oper_7 corresponds to operdate_7 then all is not
lost. But I would first

reshape long oper_ operrate_ , i(id)

and then clean up by renaming, dropping missing, sorting on date.

But although you named these variables, I fear there are others. (In
which variables are the re-operation codes?)

I fear that's only a start and you may need to report back.

Nick

On Fri, Jul 6, 2012 at 3:22 PM, Stephen Martin
<stephen.martin@york.ac.uk> wrote:

> I have a dataset for patients admitted to hospital.  Each record includes:
>
> a) a patient identifer;
> b) 24 four digit operation procedure variables (oper_1 - oper_24;
> these are four digit strings such as A148, C169, etc); and
> c) 24 date of operation variables (operdate_1 - operdate24).
>
> Many of the operation procedure code and date variables are empty.
> The operation procedure code variables are not necessarily in date
> order.
>
> I have a list (list A) of, say, 20 four digit operation codes that can
> identify whether a patient received an operation for the condition in
> which I am interested.
>
> I also have a list (list B) of, say, 35 re-operation codes.
>
> I would like to identify those patients who had both the operation and
> the re-operation.
>
> However, I cannot solely use lists A and B because some of the same
> codes appear in both lists, and a re-operation must occur at least one
> day later than the initial operation.
>
> Thus I would like to identify patients who:
> (a) have an operation code from list A
> and
> (b) have an re-operation code from list B
> and
> (c) where the date of the re-operation is later than the initial operation.
>
> Suggestions on how to do this would be very welcome!
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