You work for a pharmaceutical research consortium that operates clinical trials

Question

You work for a pharmaceutical research consortium that operates clinical trials for a variety of new medications. Each trial has a name, a date started, and a completion date. Each trial has a large number of patients, for each of whom you would like to store first name, middle name/initial, last name, phone number, address information, birth date, gender, and date of admission to the trial, along with the patient's height, weight, blood pressure, and cholesterol level at the date of admission. Each patient is allowed to serve in only one trial. For each trial, you wish to store a name, a date started, a completion date, and the identities of all physicians administering the trial. More than one physician can work on a trial, and a physician can work on more than one trial. For each physician, you want to store first name, middle name/initial, last name, employing institution, the institution from which they obtained their degree, phone number, e-mail, and address information.

Draw ER diagram and write a database design outline for a database appropriate for this information.

Explanation / Answer

Entity Relationship Diagram of ER Diagram as they are widely known as are used to describe the relationship between two or more entities from different type of data sets. ER Diagram is not possible to paste in this work sheet, so let me explain how it can be done in master data maintained in spreadsheet.

First need to identify, how many master data sheets needs to be maintained to store all the information. Here in this care we need to maintain three type of master data sheet.

1. Trial master, all the data treated to the trial done, like start date, completion date, name of the trial, etc. This row will be assigned a unique number and will be considered a entry.

Example - Trial name - Diabetes, Start Date - April 12 2018, Completion Date - June 18 2018, Trial unique code - 5001234

2. Patient master, now there could be number of patients who will be particupation on each of the trials, once data will be maintained which comprises of the only th patient information like name of the patient, age, gender, weight, height etc. This database do not contain any information of the trials done by the particular patient.

3. Physician master, as mentioned, there could be n number of physicians working on a common Trial of a particular physician working on different trial. This data would contain information like name of the physician, employing institutions, degree, etc without mentioning the trial on which he/ she is working or patient involved.

When a trial take place, a combined data would be stored in the final sheet mentioning the row number of each of the entry. Thus will create a unique number of combination from all the three sets of information.

Like wise there could be number of combinations which can be stored in various permutations and combinations.

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