Identify people who was electively admitted

[yugangjia]

Should I look at admitdxpath only? Any other data source for this info?

[jraffa]

Yes, there will be some identified in the admissiondx table (admitdxpath column) as you say.

You may pick up a few others in the apachepredvar table (elective column). In theory these should be the same, as I believe one is derived from the other.

A caveat is that (I believe) this would only identify apache scored patients. Patients without an APACHE score will not have this coded. This would exclude, for e.g., patient admitted to the ICU post-surgery and discharged within 6hrs, among other reasons.

If you need these patients, you may need to look at the admission sources:

select hospitaladmitsource,unitadmitsource, count(hospitaladmitsource) as c from patient GROUP by hospitaladmitsource, unitadmitsource ORDER by c desc

hospitaladmitsource	unitadmitsource	c
Emergency Department	Emergency Department	65562
	Emergency Department	23363
Operating Room	Operating Room	15032
Floor	Floor	14111
Direct Admit	Direct Admit	9349
	Floor	6702
Emergency Department	ICU to SDU	6383
	Operating Room	5890
Recovery Room	Recovery Room	5378
Other Hospital	Other Hospital	2793

...snip

I would assume many OR-OR patients with stays <6hrs are elective (I would try to test this assumption), but you may not need them depending on the study.