Using large databases for extracting data can be cumbersome, fortunately it’s more reliable than sifting for gold. The image is CC by Won-Tolla.

I put a lot of effort in to my first article to calculate the comorbidities of a patient according to the Charlson & Elixhauser scores. The available scripts were in SAS and Stata, as I started out using SPSS I decided to implement the code in the neat Python plugin that SPSS provides. In this post I’ll provide you with a detailed walk through of my code, and hopefully it will save you some time. Continue reading →