NorviTech / Consulting / Inflated DA2 totals
Why a DA2 report’s totals come out inflated
When a Discern Analytics 2.0 report puts two unrelated child lists side by side, every sum below them is quietly multiplied.
The short version
Take one appointment with three charges and two time entries. If the report shows charges and time entries as two independent lists on the same rows, the extract does not carry three rows plus two. It carries every pairing, three times two, and each charge appears twice, each time entry three times. Sum the units column and you have counted every charge twice.
That is a cross join, and it is one of the most common reasons a DA2 report’s totals do not match the source system.
How to spot it
- The total is too high by a ratio that wobbles. A join bug that doubles everything is easy to see. A cross join inflates each parent by a different factor, depending on how many rows its other list has, so the overall error looks like noise.
- Identical rows repeat inside one parent. Sort the extract by the parent key. If the same charge line appears once for every time entry, the two lists are multiplying each other.
- It gets worse on busy records. Parents with long lists on both sides inflate the most, so the busiest days, clinicians or patients look the most productive.
How to total it correctly
Change the report
Where you own the report, return each child list separately, or aggregate each list to one row per parent before they meet. That fixes every consumer at once.
De-duplicate before summing
Where you cannot change it, reduce each list to its distinct rows per parent, using the columns that identify a charge or a time entry, and only then sum. Never sum the rendered rows directly.
Reconcile once
Pick a few parents, count their children in the source system by hand, and compare. Ten minutes of this settles whether a report’s totals can be trusted.
The same shape also hides a quieter problem: a column that means different things on different rows. Time lost to a cancellation, for example, can sit in the same minutes column as treatment time. Before summing a column, check that every row puts the same kind of thing in it.
Next
- Discern Analytics 2.0 consulting — report builds, scheduled extracts, dashboards and training
- DA2, Discern Explorer and the Reporting Portal — which one a request needs
- Automating scheduled DA2 extracts into a dashboard
- Choosing a DA2 report’s date window, and its time zone
- Getting DA2 data into Google, Azure or your warehouse
- DA2 reporting on the Continuum and CommunityWorks domains
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