Hello everyone!
In our source Epic data we have a timestamp column for birth datetime, though for >99% of patients the time is 00:00:00, so for the most part it really represents birth date and we don’t have an accurate birth datetime for most patients. I’m wondering how others have populated the person.birth_datetime in similar circumstances. From the documentation the conventions around this aren’t completely clear to me.
The main options I’m considering are:
- person.birth_datetime will only be non-null for the small number of patients where we do have a time other than 00:00:00 indicating the birth time (and not just date) is known. For the rest it will be null, but birth date could be determined from the year_of_birth, month_of_birth, and day_of_birth columns as needed.
- populate person.birth_datetime even when we don’t have a reliable time
- #1, plus create another column in the person table for person.birth_date to have this in a date format that’s easier to use without having to create the date from the year, month, and days when needed (my understanding is that it’s fine to add additional columns to tables for our local implementation).
Thanks for sharing your insights!