--
Scott Hudnall
From: "Paul Trusten, R.Ph." <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Date: Sat, 7 Jan 2006 10:50:40 -0600
To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Cc: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: [USMA:35378] Re: proper use of SI symbols in healthcare
Hi, Scott,
Thanks very much for this information. I found it very valuable and enlightening.
You mention high processor overhead. To what extent would this make it be prohibitive for the use of UNICODE in defining fields for SI symbols in healthcare software for medical laboratory and pharmacy use?
I'm taking the liberty of sharing our discussion with Bruce Barrow of the SI 10 Committee.
Thanks,
Paul Trusten, R.Ph.
Editor, Metric Today
----- Original Message -----
From: Scott Hudnall <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: U.S. Metric Association <mailto:[email protected]>
Sent: Saturday, December 10, 2005 19:58
Subject: [USMA:35378] Re: proper use of SI symbols in healthcare
Since I work as a programmer in laboratory informatics, perhaps I could lend some insight as to why you often see these sort of abbreviations sometimes make their way into lab reports. It has nothing to do with an understanding of SI and everything to do with a compromise programmers have to make to get their software as database-independent as possible. This means if you use standard SI and chemistry symbols in your database you run into a primary-key violation on the UNITS table since every unit has to have a unique value. Some database products are case-sensitive, others are not ˆ so some databases can distinguish between mm (millimeter) and mM (millimolar), while others can not. The best way to ensure that all databases understand what you mean is to always use all capitol letters ˆ but that means you have to use non-SI symbols in order to have unique values for every entry.
Also, to be able store symbols such as Greek letters and math symbols in text fields, you would need to define the fields as UNICODE....and that is going to cost you a lot of processor overhead.
--
Scott Hudnall
From: "Paul Trusten, R.Ph." <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Reply-To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Date: Sat, 10 Dec 2005 16:31:43 -0600
To: "U.S. Metric Association" <[email protected]>
Cc: Bruce Barrow <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: [USMA:35376] proper use of SI symbols in healthcare
It comes down to which healthcare professionals or agencies understand the
importance of SI symbolism. If we presume to use a true standard of
measurement in healthcare, then everyone involved must use the same symbols.
Sadly, they don't do it uniformly. There are even more egregious violations
of that symbolism in pharmacy software. Pharmacists who care about this
would be grateful, right now, to see ANY letter "g" for gram, much less the
correct, lower case "g." But much current pharmacy software uses the same
erroneous "GM." that much of healthcare uses. Retail pharmacies usually do
not employ lower case on their prescription labels, so "MG" takes the place
of the correct symbol for the milligram on most prescription labels.
Last year, the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations
(JCAHO) began prohibiting ambiguous abbreviations in medical records, but it
has yet to extend this enforcement to correct SI unit symbols. An
unfortunate, but practical, exception to SI symbol use in healthcare is
JCAHO's prohibition of the Greek letter "mu" for the SI prefix "micro." When
handwritten, "mu" is is easily confused with a lower case "m," and, I must
say, is not a familiar symbol to quite a few healthcare workers anyway.
Better metric education, coupled with a transition to 100% electronic
records, should one day solve that problem.
I shall continue to urge the Institute for Safe Medication Practices (ISMP)
to push for the correct use of SI in healthcare.
Paul T.
----- Original Message -----
From: "Jim Elwell" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: "U.S. Metric Association" <[email protected]>
Sent: 05 Dec 10,Saturday 13:47
Subject: [USMA:35372] blood tests
> I had my annual physical last Monday, and received the blood test lab
> printouts yesterday. It won't surprise anyone that they are all in
> metric: g/dL, mg/dL, etc.
>
> Unfortunately, the entire document is printed in upper-case text. So
> the symbols really show up as:
>
> MG/DL
> MMOL/L
> G/DL
>
> The other problem is they list microliter as MCL.
>
> I don't know if this is standard in the medical industry or just this
> particular testing lab. It is unfortunate, in any case.
>
> The company that did the testing is Quest Diagnostics. They say on
> thier web site: "Quest Diagnostics is America's leading provider of
> diagnostic testing services, performing laboratory tests for more
> than 500,000 patients each day."
>
> Jim
>
>
>
>
> Jim Elwell, CAMS
> Electrical Engineer
> Industrial manufacturing manager
> Salt Lake City, Utah, USA
> www.qsicorp.com
>
>
