st: counting types of diagnoses, and making a table of them, by student

["Christopher W. Ryan" <cryan@binghamton.edu>]

I run a family medicine clerkship for 3rd year medical students.  As the 
year goes by, I want to start classifying their patient visits by ICPC-2 
categories (International Classification of Primary Care.)  No doubt 
some of you are familiar with it:  for example, K86 = hypertension, R74 
= a cold, etc.

My department uses MS Access for this kind of data tracking, and I can 
get data from there into Stata via StatTransfer.

I could create a database, one record for each visit, with a field for 
ICPC diagnosis code.  Trouble is, each visit could have 2, 3, or more 
codes.  If I made 3-4 diagnosis fields, into which to enter the ICPC 
codes, I don't know how I would tabulate them in Stata, to determine how 
many patients with K86 each student saw; sometimes a K86 might appear in 
variable diagnosis1, other times in variable diagnosis2, etc.

So I created a bunch of binary (yes/no) fields in the Access database, 
one for each of the most common ICPC codes.  Then in Stata, the 
following (for example) works great:

--tabstat a97 r74 k86 r78, by(studentid) statistics(sum) 
columns(variables)--

It gets me the following (excerpted):

studentid	a97	r74	k86	r78
				
1780	0	0	0	0
1781	0	0	0	0
1782	0	0	0	0
5555	1	2	1	0
				
Total	1	2	1	0

My problem:  each variable has a variable label (for example, a97 is "no 
disease").  I would like the variable labels to appear at the tops of 
the columns, rather than the variable names, and I can't figure out how 
to do this.

--desc a97-- confirms that the variable label is in place.

I would appreciate any instructions on how to make the variable labels 
appear, or on my strategy in general.

Thanks.

--
Christopher W. Ryan, MD
SUNY Upstate Medical University Clinical Campus at Binghamton
and Wilson Family Practice Residency, Johnson City, NY
cryanatbinghamtondotedu
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