Stephanie: week 17

This week I will begin to work on the problem of finding discrepancies of smoking statuses. In our weekly meeting we discussed some of the challenges that will come with this - primarily that smoking status can change in a much more complicated way than diabetes status. In the case of diabetes the patient must have had diabetes, so if they did not we knew there was a discrepancy. Smoking status, on the other hand, can switch back and forth many times However, if a patient is listed as a smoker in the first visit, and then as never having smoked in any later visits then there is a discrepancy. This is definitely going to be an interesting project.