grouping patient diagnoses

[marilyn934]

I need to figure out the earliest diagnosis that a patient has given that each patient has many encounters and 10 diagnosis codes for each encounter. The catch is that we only want to look at certain diagnosis codes. Does anyone have any ideas? I already sorted by PatientID and encdate. Just looking at diag1 isn't too difficult. It's after that things get sticky 😐

[Doc_Duke]

use PROC TRANSPOSE to convert from one row per encounter to one row per diagnosis. then you can treat it as you would diag1.