Measurements after date of death

[Niccolo-Ajroldi]

I have noticed that there are some patients with measurements after the date of death.

I am a little confused, because from this issue, it seems that dateofdeath should be exact for patients who died in ICU, but from this other issue, it seems that dateofdeath may be approximated.

Should I truncate the inpatient stay to the date of death and treat the measurements as errors? Or should I treat the date of death as an error and match it to the discharge offset?
Thank you in advance!

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Reproducible example: admissionid=1013, has two creatinine measurements after dateofdeath.

[T3hlo]

Could it be that the lab results were received after the death of the patient? I am no expert in lab tests but have a look at some turnaround times for urgent and non-urgent creatinine tests here. Maybe this fits the timeline?

[patrickthoral]

dateofdeath is documented independently of dischargedat. While dischargedat was documented in the ICU system, and should be similar to e.g. the last documented heart rate (numericitems, itemid == 6640; Hartfrequentie), the origin of dateofdeath includes other hospital systems. This may partly explain why, even for patients that died on the ICU these values are not the same. In addition, for the non-ICU systems time was not a requirement, only date, so this may also explain the difference. It is technically possible that the results of laboratory measurements may be received after death, but in any case measuredat should be before the patient actually died, with the exception of the post-mortem, but that is currently not part of the data set.