This week, I learned about databases by reading about that chapter in Stephen Ramsay’s A Companion to Digital Humanities. In short, a database is like a computerized filing system. As mentioned in the reading, the purpose of a database is to store information about a particular domain or subject. The reading gave us an example of a database that contains information about American novels. A table was given as an example of a database design that included a list of the author’s name, year of birth, year of death, title of the book, publication year, publisher, etc. This example reminded me of databases that hospitals have to use in order to speculate patients and their past medical history.
In my previous part-time job, I worked as a blood donor recruiter for the UCLA Blood & Platelet Center. The UCLA Ronald Reagan Hospital would contact us daily letting us know which blood type they were in need of, and it was my job to make sure we meet that demand by calling, emailing, or going out on blood drives to recruit new donors. I was trained to use the MediTech system which was the hospital’s database of all the patients’ information. One of my responsibilities were to make sure that the donors were indeed eligible to donate. First, I would search the donor’s name in the database. When I do this, I’m able to see the donor’s basic information such as birth date, gender, contact number, address, etc. In addition, I can view the donor’s blood type, the last time the donor donated blood or platelets, if he or she traveled to a foreign country that is a high risk area for malaria, if he or she has tattoos or piercings that would make the donor ineligible to donate for a year, or if the donor is taking any medication. Moreover, there were various tags or acronyms that we would have to decipher because some of them meant that the donor could never donate or that he or she would have to talk to a charge nurse first before being approved to donate blood. By navigating and investigating the hospitals database of patients and donors, I’m able to determine if a donor is eligible to donate blood on a certain day.
If it wasn’t for this donor database, it would be next to impossible to recruit a high volume of blood donors because it would be difficult to keep track of all of the donors’ information, especially the aspects that would make them ineligible to donate blood or platelets. Therefore, databases are extremely crucial in the digital era where quick retrieval of information is ideal.