Re orders

[Perplexed1]

I have a very large excel sheet with thousands of hospital admissions. I
want to find the number of readmissions. If I have a Unique Identifer for
each person and an admission and discharge date. Is there a way of looking
at readmisisons within 2 weeks. Note some of these Unique Identifers will
have several records.

Help I am stuck

 

[Bill Sanderson]

This group is devoted to Microsoft's antispyware application - Windows
Defender.

Offhand, from my knowledge of Excel, it seems to me that your problem is
definitely solvable.

However, I'm going to try to avoid taking a stab at it myself, and see if I
can get you to the right group where folks with the proper expertise hang
out.

Here's a faq for posting Excel problems to a newsgroup:

http://www.cpearson.com/excel/newposte.htm

It has some useful links in it that may help you solve the problem on your
own.

Here's an upper level link to Office-related groups--choose carefully among
the Excel groups--if you can fit your issue into one other than "General
Questions" you may get a better response. It is NOT a good idea to just
post to all of them, or even two of them. Try posting to one, and if you
don't get a response after a few days, try another.

http://www.microsoft.com/office/community/en-us/FlyoutOverview.mspx#2

I'm interested in your issue--if you do post, you might reply back to this
thread with a link to your actual posted message. I can use that to try to
follow what happens--and if you don't get useful help, I can see what I can
think of myself.

If I understand your problem correctly, you want to build a table of unique
ID's with admission dates. There will be precisely one Unique ID (that's
what unique means!) but multiple admit dates. You want to determine how
many unique ID's have successive admit dates that are within two weeks of
the previous admit date. So--each time you come to an admit date, you test
it against the previous admit date for that ID, and if it is within two
weeks, you increment a counter--maybe one associated with that ID--so in the
end you have a table of ID's and counts of re-admissions.

This seems eminently do-able to me--but I'm not sure whether it takes Visual
Basic for Applications, or whether it can be done purely with Excel
functions. I suspect it can be done within Excel, but it is not something
I've done before.

 

[Stu]

I`m by no means an expert on Excel but would I right right in thinking this
would call for a conditional function? I do know there is a conditional IF
statement and a COUNT one too. Whether or not they would be geared to accept
the values envisaged is another matter - I`m sure the COUNT one would be no
problem but the IF ??

Stu

 

[Bill Sanderson]

Yeah - that's where I decided I didn't have the time at the moment to really
dig into it and see whether I knew how to do it. Visual Basic for apps can
do darn near anything.

And, I know you can do math with dates in excel--i.e. use logic to determine
if date y is greater than and within two weeks of date x--but I've never
needed to do this, so I can't spout the syntax off the top of my head.

 

[Stu]

Great!! Now Visual Basic is another thing Bill. I bought a MS book with disc
some time back thinking it would be nothing more than an exstention of the
old BBC Basic which was introduced over here many moons ago. Don`t know if
you ever got to hear about it in the U.S of A . It came on a ROM programmed
with the syntax necessary to make it work and a BBC computer with no less
than 32KB of memory -extendable to 128KB!! Wow!! All you had to do was
reference the syntax (a book 2 inches thick at least) to know how to present
and what values would be acceptable. I used to love PROCS (Procedures) and
conditional statements. IF .. THEN ... ELSE. What is more, I understood how
to apply it in some everyday situations - not least of all my profession.
Sadly (for me), VB is like going from kinder garden to Uni teachings. Good
luck if you decide to try the project.

Stu

 

[Bill Sanderson]

I've got a single spreadsheet which uses VB for some of its
functionality--it is an in/out signin sheet, and if you check the in box,
the whole line turns green for easy visual spotting.

It has been an incredible pain--there are only about 30 staff people, but
any little change takes a lot of effort. Since each row has indentical
stuff except for labels, it could probably be done using some sort of array
functions in a few lines, but I don't know the array functions, so each line
is a separate set of routines.....

 

[Stu]

Hmm - great stuff Bill and is the clever bit for me. How to integrate an
application of my creation into a MS application. I mean, I can work my way
thru an excercise and come up with the right result and go some way to
understand the code. BUT what happens next?? <smile>.

Your scenario sounds a bit like a spreadsheet I had which would highlight
those entries (in colour) relating to those guys who were out of time - so to
speak. In my profession it was essential for a guy to accumulate so many
hours per month in order to maintain a particular rating he held OK? If they
achieved those hours the fields would show `Green` If not `Red` BUT only up
to the point (on a particular Row) they conformed to the condition set by me
in the spreadsheet. Those parameters could be set through Excel to give you
the desired presentation. I think it was called `Conditional Formatting`and
I`m wondering if that could not be applied in other cases of a more complex
nature ????? Only trouble I see is that with a relatively few entries like we
have - I had thirty you have a few more. It was easy to present each entry
with a tab of its own. With hospital records of several hundred that may not
be a practical solution in Excel. Obviously, a daily input would be necessary
in order to update the spreadsheet but it would update quite successfully.
Maybe this guy should be looking at Access?

Stu

 

[Stu]

Only trouble I see is that with a relatively few entries like we

have - I had thirty you have a few more.

Oops! Seems like we have the same - what the heck!

Stu

 

[Bill Sanderson]

Interesting--Yes, a visual presentation works well for a relatively small
dataset. I agree--this guys problem needs more--he's really wanting
something that can be used statistically--i.e. if they make a change of some
kind in the way problem X is treated in the hospital, do the repeat
admission stats change?