The noteevents table

Table source: Hospital database.

Table purpose: Contains all notes for patients.

Number of rows: 2,083,180

Links to:

• PATIENTS on SUBJECT_ID
• ADMISSIONS on HADM_ID
• CAREGIVERS on CGID

Important considerations

• TEXT is often large and contains many newline characters: it may be easier to read if viewed in a distinct program rather than the one performing the queries.
• Echo reports, ECG reports, and radiology reports are available for both inpatient and outpatient stays. If a patient is an outpatient, there will not be an HADM_ID associated with the note. If the patient is an inpatient, but was not admitted to the ICU for that particular hospital admission, then there will not be an HADM_ID associated with the note.
• Echos are generated using templates and in some cases there may be discrepancies in severity. For example one report may contain: “Mild PA systolic hypertension. Severe PA systolic hypertension.” indicating that the caregiver may not have removed the appropriate item from the template.

Table columns

Name	Postgres data type
ROW_ID	INT
SUBJECT_ID	INT
HADM_ID	INT
CHARTDATE	TIMESTAMP(0)
CHARTTIME	TIMESTAMP(0)
STORETIME	TIMESTAMP(0)
CATEGORY	VARCHAR(50)
DESCRIPTION	VARCHAR(300)
CGID	INT
ISERROR	CHAR(1)
TEXT	TEXT

Detailed Description

SUBJECT_ID, HADM_ID

Identifiers which specify the patient: SUBJECT_ID is unique to a patient and HADM_ID is unique to a patient hospital stay.

CHARTDATE, CHARTTIME, STORETIME

CHARTDATE records the date at which the note was charted. CHARTDATE will always have a time value of 00:00:00.

CHARTTIME records the date and time at which the note was charted. If both CHARTDATE and CHARTTIME exist, then the date portions will be identical. All records have a CHARTDATE. A subset are missing CHARTTIME. More specifically, notes with a CATEGORY value of ‘Discharge Summary’, ‘ECG’, and ‘Echo’ never have a CHARTTIME, only CHARTDATE. Other categories almost always have both CHARTTIME and CHARTDATE, but there is a small amount of missing data for CHARTTIME (usually less than 0.5% of the total number of notes for that category).

STORETIME records the date and time at which a note was saved into the system. Notes with a CATEGORY value of ‘Discharge Summary’, ‘ECG’, ‘Radiology’, and ‘Echo’ never have a STORETIME. All other notes have a STORETIME.

CATEGORY, DESCRIPTION

CATEGORY and DESCRIPTION define the type of note recorded. For example, a CATEGORY of ‘Discharge summary’ indicates that the note is a discharge summary, and the DESCRIPTION of ‘Report’ indicates a full report while a DESCRIPTION of ‘Addendum’ indicates an addendum (additional text to be added to the previous report).

CGID

CGID is the identifier for the caregiver who input the note.

ISERROR

A ‘1’ in the ISERROR column indicates that a physician has identified this note as an error.

TEXT

TEXT contains the note text.