Enhancement request: xlateStrCalcAge should provide more than years

I agree with this request. Sometimes there is a need to calculate the age of a newborn (for example to filter an ADT or Results feed) and this can only be expressed in days. So there is a legitimate need to calculate the age in days.

A bigger concern for me is that xlateStrCalcAge does not seem to account for leap years.

It’s dividing days old by 365, so the older the patient’s age, the greater the calculation error will be.

For example, if a patient was born 3/15/1950, and it’s currently 2023, the patient’s age in years will be calculated as 73 as early as 2/25/2023 – 18 days early.

Hi Jim,

I found this code ages ago at https://wiki.tcl-lang.org/page/clock for calculating age at least.

It expects the date to be YYYYMMDD

proc calculateAge { strDOB } {
set dtDOB [clock scan $strDOB]
# Date-of-birth (in seconds relative to epoch) in $dob
foreach {Ynow CMPnow} [clock format [clock seconds] -format “%Y 1%m%d”] {}
foreach {Ydob CMPdob} [clock format $dtDOB -format “%Y 1%m%d”] {}
set ageInYears [expr { $Ynow-$Ydob-($CMPnow<$CMPdob) }]
return $ageInYears
}

Actually, it seems to.  But maybe only on a 64 bit system.  I seem to remember issues on AIX with clock and 8.4 with a couple of patients over 100 way back when but have not seen anything since we moved to redhat.

I ran the following and received correct results so it seems to cover whatever clock can handle.

Assuming current date of 20230310

hcitcl>calculateAge 15230310
500
hcitcl>calculateAge 15230309
500
hcitcl>calculateAge 15230311
499

A simple proc to calculate elapsed days.  You could put this in your tclprocs directory and then just source in Xlate or wherever like:
source $::Hcisitedir/tclprocs/numberOfDays
set days [numberOfDays  $date
date must be in foramt YYYYMMDD
You could also put in a common package if you have one.
Do not add .tcl suffix if in tclprocs directory, it would wind up in your tcl index file

You also add the code to an existing proc.

proc numberOfDays {date} {

# Expects date in form of YYYYMMDD

# Since date time is assumed to be midnight set now time to same
# Get number of seconds now
set nowSec [clock scan [clock format [clock scan now] -format %y%m%d]]

# Number of seconds in date
set dateSec [clock scan $date]

# Take difference in seconds and divide by number of seconds in day
# and return that value
return [expr ($nowSec – $dateSec) / 86400]
}