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I'm a surgeon, just starting my career. I'm hoping / planning to accumulate a 30-year dataset of surgical patients, with one or several procedures associated with each patient. Each procedure will have several outcome measures that are either shared between all procedures (eg wound infection) or specific to the procedure (eg recurrence of a hernia after surgery). Each procedure also has 1-5 codes associated with it--there is a standard set of codes, and several codes may apply to one procedure. An Excel spreadsheet seems less than ideal for this sort of nested or flexible dataset, and I was hoping for recommendations from the community. My ideal final product will also be flexible enough to export the dataset, so I'm not locked in to 2010 technology. I'll use the data to document my individual complication / success rate, experience with different procedures, and report case series in the medical literature.
Any suggestions would be great.
On a scale of 30 years, you will probably change technologies several times. So at each step, be very careful about vendor lock-in. Only go for software that is able to export the data in some very widely-supported format. And make regular backups in that format. – Gilles 'SO- stop being evil' – 2010-12-14T00:32:43.387