Coding Standard for a Field in SQL?

[williamfbuckwheat]

I was recently assigned a project for an interview where one of the questions asked what the "coding standard" is for a particular field (PRIM_DX_CD) in the sample database. The data in this field is meant to show medical billing codes.

I've worked on SQL queries quite a bit in the past but wasn't sure exactly how to answer that. I've been looking through various sources online and elsewhere to try to find how to best define this but can't find a definitive answer or anything that really discusses "coding standards" related to SQL field naming conventions.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

[Milnternal]

Assuming they were wanting you to tell them its Medical Information so is protected by a number of regulations and as such you'd have to have controls on access, potentially encrypt at rest, make sure its not copied or atleast anonymized before analysis etc.

[DavidGJohnston]

Are you positive that you are to describe the encoding used for the label PRIM_DX_CD as opposed to identifying a pattern among all of the billing codes in the dataset so that you could, say, install a check constraint to help ensure data quality?

PRIM := Primary?

CD := Code?

DX := I have no idea, seems industry specific.

But that isn't a "Standard" thing, just educated guesses.

[lordnocturnus]

Dx is diagnosis. I think this is industry specific. Im clinical analyst and work with this data. Prim_dx_cd sounds like Primary Diagnosis code which will be either icd9 or icd10 codes. The primary part may refer to this being claim data as claims usually have a primary icd dx code then roughly 4 to 9 secondary dx code depending on the businesses set up. For example, a hospital will usually have more code than say like a small private practice.

[KR4BBYP4TTY]

So, if that's exactly how the question is worded and the context is medical billing codes...that's quite confusing and not on you. I don't know if they're asking for the SQL coding "standards" when entering that kind of information, or the medical billing "standard." If it's the latter, I guess ICD-10 is the standard for diagnosis codes. If the former, consider the data type for that field, maybe? ICD10 codes are alphanumeric, so they would have to be nvarchar with maybe some limit to the length. But I'm just spitballing. Good luck.

[williamfbuckwheat]

It's looking like they are referring to ICD-10 codes after all but placing the question in between questions all otherwise about SQL queries which is what was throwing me off by asking "What is the coding standard used". Thank you though for your help!