what kind of approach is suitable (a data structure or by databse tables?)

Question

Hi guys,

I’m doing a patient registration system to a hospital, here we have 1st time visits and 2nd time visits, 1st time visits is put to 2nd time category after doctor checks them and tell them to revisit, so until they are put to 2nd time visit table i need to keep 1st time visits in a temporary place to add them to the permanent table, if the patients are not visiting 2nd time they are discarded and not put to the table.

so i need to keep them in a temporary place while doctor checks them and tell the system that they are revisiting patients, what kind of data type, or methodology is suitable for this? or is it suitable to put another table as 1st time visits , 1st enter data to it and then after doctor checks and confirms they are revisiting remove them form 1st time table and put them to the permanent table?

(there are approximately 1500 patients visiting the hospital, and about 800-900 are new patients, i'm using CODEIGNITER as my php framework for this project )

regards, Rangana

Answer 1

If the only difference between the two types of patients is whether it's their first visit or not, it would be a silly idea to dedicate another table for this.

Simply have an attribute in the one table which indicates the status of the patient (first-timer or ... old-timer, I guess).

If a decision is made at some point to mark someone as "will not become an old-timer, just remove them from the table altogether. Though that's not how I'd approach it since you never know if they might return and, by removing them, you have no record that they've been there before.

Leaving first-timers lying around in a table doesn't sound too onerous, especially if there's only about a thousand of them.