Spokane Hospitals vs Medicare statistics

Via this post from the Sunlight Foundation - http://reporting.sunlightfoundation.com/2011/medical-errors-2/ - I thought I'd see how the Spokane hospitals stack up in screwing up. I filtered each of the datasets to Spokane and sorted by name, not rate.  Read the article for any disclaimers on the content of the data.

Falls and Trauma

Blood Infections

Urinary tract infections

Bed Sores

Poor Glycemic Control

Foreign objects left in body

Our hospitals each reported zero Air Embolisms and Wrong blood type.

C# 4 Dynamics and XML

I've seen a couple of cool libraries for using dynamics to magically access your JSON. I knew similar things must be available for XML, and went looking. At this point, my usage is focused on read-only access to xml, of varying styles. Values may arbitrarily be in attributes or child nodes.

The two that I found that and decided to evaluate were Anoop Madhusudanan's ElasticObject and Aaron Powell's Dynamics library.

I set up a test application looking to evaluate performance and syntax. I accessed a handful of nodes, including one array of nodes and it's children. For the hand-built version, I set up a simple set of objects with simple properties and wrote code to extract values from XElements.

I had a bit of trouble with the API for the Dynamics library, but I saw some performance promise, so I went ahead to make modifications and support my needs. I went ahead and forked the project on bitbucket to share my changes here.

For the performance check, my Hand-Built code ended up at 6 milliseconds, Dynamics at 75 ms, and Elastic at 237 milliseconds (I pre-loaded the xml into an XElement and timed the parsing). So, the tradeoff here is time spent coding vs runtime. I don't expect my real usage to have a significant impact on the user's experience, so I'm ok with Dynamic's 12x slowdown for now. If it becomes a problem, I'll have a nice bottleneck to remove for version 2 :).

Here are some syntax comparisons:

Attribute Access
Hand-Built	if (t.MizConfig.InstrumentPlatform != "TC")
ElasticObject	if (t.MizConfig.InstrumentPlatform != "TC")
Dynamics plus mod	Multi-level nesting was not possible as written, MizConfig was returning a string. Changed code to allow if (t.MizConfig.InstrumentPlatform != "TC")
Iterating multiple same-named elements
Hand-Built	foreach (var ch in t.MizConfig.HWChannels)
ElasticObject	foreach (var ch in t.MizConfig["HWChannel"])
Dynamics	foreach (var ch in t.MizConfig.HWChannels)
Accessing Value (non-iterator) as a double. Note: hand-built is able to hide extraneous nodes from me
Hand-Built	d = t.PusherConfiguration.MaxForwardSpeed;
ElasticObject	d = double.Parse(~t.PusherConfiguration.Speeds.Record_Speed.Max);
Dynamics	d = double.Parse(t.PusherConfiguration.Speeds.Record_Speed.Max.Value);
Dynamics plus mod	d = t.PusherConfiguration.Speeds.Record_Speed.Max.To();
Conditionally dealing with optional children
Hand-Built	if(xelement.Element("YoMama") != null) during parsing
ElasticObject	if (~dyn.MizConfig.YoMama != null)
Dynamics plus mod	Didn't find an easy was as implemented, probably would have had to do dyn.MizConfig.Element.Element("YoMama") mixing in XElement access. Instead, I modified the code to allow if (dyn.MizConfig.YoMama != null)