boring!

[brightlywoven]

I have found a task that I loathe even more than data entry.
Data clean up.

I made a brief foray into stata, but found that my database was full of little holes, and if I didn't clean it up i'd be getting junk. Now, as I sift through thousands of pages in no particular order, I wish I'd been more organised.

And in the more rigorous world of clinical trial cleaning, we have reached new lows of pedantry. Today I received a query, asking me to reconcile two entries that did not 'exactly match'.
Listed under medical history (the patient's condition) "Reversal of ileostomy August 2007, with post-operative pain"
Listed under medication indication (the reason a medication was given) "Post operative pain following reversal of ileostomy".

Surely it is obvious to the most lay of lay persons that these are THE EXACT SAME THING!
Ironically, the only way to satisfy this pedant monster would be to say that the paracetamol was given for "Reversal of ileostomy August 2007, with post-operative pain", as though the operation was something we needed to 'treat'. Dammit.

Comments

[overconvergent.livejournal.com]

I feel your pain, but I would prefer people to make even stupid queries rather than just altering things willy-nilly; that's a great way for people to really break mathematical articles :)

[dr-biscuit.livejournal.com]

Ah, but she cannot change anything.
Her favourite thing seems to be to make the following query:
'You wrote that such and such has happened. Please verify that it has'.
or my personal favourite
'Patient had abdominal pain on day 1, but there is no abdominal pain documented on day 10. Please verify this is true' Yes of course it effing is, because I effing cured her, didn't I?!!!?

See the data she is getting has already be checked by me and by a monitor, so it's not just raw scribblings. Gree.

[dr-biscuit.livejournal.com]

Sorry, that was a bit of an outburst! I think the reason it's so frustrating is that it's not like a long email with lots of questions to which I can reply yes/no/fixed, it's a formal process on a large (slow) database, so when she says something like 'oh, did what you've written really happen', it takes me 5 minutes to write 'yes it has'. I often feel like saying 'that's why I wrote it, and my monitor approved it you stupid bint', but that would be unprofessional ;)

[overconvergent.livejournal.com]

No worries; it must be frustrating to have to spend 5 minutes doing this makework. Can't you find this person something else to do? (colour-arranging paperclips seems about the level ...)

[dr-biscuit.livejournal.com]

if only! She's in americaland, so the best I can do is snooty messages, that she doesn't reply to.

At one point I suggested that instead of raising new queries on unchecked pages (!!!) she could close some of the several hundred queries to which I had replied already. No reponse, no queries closed.

Maybe I'll send her some paperclips...