st: Loop question

["Steve Pitts" <pittssteve@gmail.com>]

Dear statalisters,

I'm trying to work out how many patients are already present in an emergency 
department (a variable called "how_busy") for each member in a list of 
patients that includes the variables "arrival datetime" and "discharge 
datetime", i.e. I'd like to know how many patients preceding the index 
patient have dcdt > current arrdt in a list of visits sorted by arrdt.  I'm 
no programmer and fairly new to Stata, and haven't been able to make it work 
using -forval- and -while- loops with explicit subscripting. Maybe there's a 
clever way to do this using -egen-?

An alternative "how_busy" measure might be a count of all patients who were 
in the ED during any part of the index patient's visit (maybe it got busy 
later). I think this would need to be divided by length of stay. In any case 
for me: equally impossible, but maybe this is easy for someone else.

Thanks

Steve Pitts 
*
*   For searches and help try:
*   http://www.stata.com/support/faqs/res/findit.html
*   http://www.stata.com/support/statalist/faq
*   http://www.ats.ucla.edu/stat/stata/