DB Design – ICD9 Data

Dave Rowe — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 23:02:48 +0000

ICD9 data are the diagnosis and procedure codes used by insurance companies to categorize, well, diagnoses and procedures to be determined / performed by medical professionals. Typically, if you visit the doctor for an ailment and file insurance, your provider will list the reason for the visit, any diagnoses, and any procedures performed. This is then sent to the insurance company for processing. They can then use codes to indicate if the procedure is covered, as well as, (for example) determine if the diagnosis was a pre-existing condition. The data is a simple hierarchical structure which is shown in the following diagram.

ERD for storing ICD9 data

We see that diagnoses can have sub-diagnoses, etc. I used this simple structure, and added a qualifying column of ‘record_type’ to indicate if the code listed was an actual diagnosis, or a section header. Sections of diagnoses are part of the data, and can be used in searching the database. This diagram offers a simple and quick design to handle the data given.

Comments are welcome.

Adventures in Database Design

Dave Rowe — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 03:39:56 +0000

I’ve long neglected this blog, and the power behind it to discuss my feelings toward database design. Proper database design is the backbone to a solid application. Failing to correctly normalize tables and enforce business logic with foreign key relationships can cause undue headaches.

What I’ll be doing is going through some simple applications, and start modeling the tables and relationships, and intersperse some commentary where useful. The discussion depends on interaction, and I’m of the opinion that a ‘good’ database designer can a) defend their design articulately and b) know when to concede a good point.

Database design is becoming organic. Strict adherence to the normal forms isn’t required any longer. Let me be clear though, denormalizing a table to make things easier for a developer is not a valid reason to denormalize.

The modeling tool I’ll be using for generating the images is MySQL Workbench. Workbench is a very powerful tool, from the source of one of the most powerful (and used) databases today. I cut my teeth on database design with DBDesigner4, whose creator went on to work for MySQL Workbench.

Stay tuned.

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DB Design – ICD9 Data

Adventures in Database Design