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How to use Visit_Occurence and Visit_detail table?

Hello Everyone,

We have stored our patient visit data into “visit_occurrence” table. A patient might have multiple visits (records) in Visit_occurrence table. I mean when a patient moves from one facility to another facility, it is recorded as two records in visit_occurrence table. Is it okay to follow this approach? I read the discussion around this topic in forum but I followed the CDM doc. Shown below. An inpatient/oupatient may be transferred to different health care facilities for multiple tests etc, so I inferred that it can be recorded as multiple records for the same person (multiple Visit_occurrence_Ids but same person_id). Is my interpretation correct?

We didn’t use Visit_detail table as we didn’t find any use of it. Are we doing it the wrong way? Are there any issues if we avoid Visit_detail table and store all records in Visit_occurrence table?

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Thanks
Selva

Using the visit_occurrence table is fine. There will not be any problems if you avoid using the visit_detail table.

1 Like

Thank you @DTorok for the response.

Nothing will break, as @DTorok said. But what you will not be able to do is to analyze the effect of individual departments, wards, consults all that that happens while a patient is in a hospital or other longer-term facility. If you put all the detail into the VISIT_OCCURRENCE table, instead of cobbling it together to a longer stay, you won’t be able to analyze the entire time the patient spends in the hospital together.

t