#8 Six Teams, Six Different Forms: My First Real Project

The therapy unit at the hospital I work for had six treatment rooms. Room 1, Room 2, Room 3, and so on, each split by the kind of therapy it handled. And each room kept its own document to record patients. The problem wasn't that the documents existed. The problem was that no two of them looked alike. Same patient. Same information. But every room ordered the columns differently and named things differently. One put the date in the first column. Another put it last. One wrote "treatment time." The room next door wrote "minutes used." On their own, each form worked fine. Looked at one at a time, there was nothing wrong. The trouble showed up the moment anyone tried to combine them. The work that never ended Every so often, a request would come down from above: Can we see the overall numbers? That was when the real work began. I would open all six documents side by side. I would line up columns that didn't match, by eye, and move each value into one master table by hand.