st: Counting a population given start/end times

[Scott Simpson <simpsons@uw.edu>]

Hi all-
First time posting, any help appreciated.

I have a data set that lists patients' clinic visits.  Given each inidividual's time into the clinica and time out of the clinic, I am trying to create a variable that tells me how many patients are in the clinic at a given time.  In essence, the clinic population at a given point in time, really, the clinic population at the point the patient arrives.

I thought I had it by counting the # of pts who had arrived before, then substracting those who left before--

sort DateandTimeIN;
gen inorder = _n;
gen inbefore = inorder - 1;
sort DateandTimeOUT;
gen outorder = _n if !missing(DateandTimeOUT);
gen leftbefore = outorder - 1;
sort DateandTimeIN;
gen currentpop = inbefore + 1 - leftbefore;

(Admittedly, there are some unaccounted patients already in clinic before my data starts, will have to manually figure that out and correct.)  The output of the above, however, gives me a lot of negative numbers for currentpop, which does not make intuitive sense to me unless the recorded time is incorrect.

This seems as though would be a common programming question but am not finding answers among local experts or online.  Must be a .do file out there for this?

best,
scott

Scott Simpson MD MPH
University of Washington School of Medicine
Seattle, WA



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