Maintaining Units

• Maintaining Units
  • Unit Scope
  • Properties of a Unit
  • Uses of Units
    • Analyte Units Creation and Maintenance
    • Unit Codes
    • Unit Dependencies and Restrictions

A unit is a definite magnitude of quantity for analysis or reporting.

Conversions between units of the same measurement type is by factor or script.

If the CODEVALIDATION_CHARACTERLIST_02 application preference is defined and contains a list of visible ASCII characters, then a unit code must only contain characters from this list. If this preference is not defined, then a unit code must only contain characters from the ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ_0123456789 string. The Scope for this preference is usually set at laboratory level.

Unit Scope

Units are created either with org-scope or lab-scope. An organisation or laboratory can contain multiple units.

Properties of a Unit

A unit can have:

• Multiple conversions—By factor or script, used to convert the unit to other units.
• Short and long symbols—Used to denote values expressed in the unit.
• A conversion suffix—To indicate a value converted to this unit when surrounding values are in a different unit.

Uses of Units

A scheme version analyte can link to unit. The unit is inherited by a sample scheme analyte when it is created from that analyte, and then used for the measurement the analyte.

A scheme version analyte can link to a report unit. The report unit is inherited by a sample scheme analyte when it is created from that analyte. When a report request is created and contains the sample scheme analyte, the report unit is inherited from the sample scheme analyte, then used for the reporting of the analyte's result. If the report unit and the measurement unit are different, a unit conversion takes place to report the results.

Analyte Units Creation and Maintenance

Any scripts applied to units originally created at organisation level are not editable at laboratory level.

Unit are managed using the CCUNIT—Unit application, which is also accessed using the Analysis Setup » Units.

For each unit, a unit code, name, description, conversion suffix, long and short symbol can be specified, along with any relevant scripts or conversion factors.

Unit Codes

The CODEVALIDATION_CHARACTERLIST_02 application preference is used by the system to reject invalid unit codes.

Unit Dependencies and Restrictions

All unit codes must be unique.

Each unit used in the system must be defined along with any conversion considerations that apply.

Once created, units are applied to scheme version analytes, specification limits, sample scheme analytes, and used in the reporting of analysis results.

Where a parameter recorded against an analyte is not a numeric result (that is, is a colour or Yes/No result), then an analysis unit is not really required.

Unit codes are used to record the unit of measure of the results, as well as the unit of reporting. During reporting if these units are not the same, then a numeric conversion of the results is performed.