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Originally Posted by tweetiepooh
Interesting issue with Scotland's trace app reading through walls.
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Many years back I wrote code for a central London hospital and part of the code was to share data with health authorities about patient episode and appointments so to "collect" moneys from them (all "funny" money - we didn't really bill them like that).
Each year the government would issue out details of what data to supply and in what format and each year I would rewrite our reporting software (and maybe some collection in the main patient system) to match the requirement.
In April we would run the old code for the March data plus an optional annual rollup (Apr-Mar). The data would be in a known format (column width) with data items encoded to NHS standards (it was anonymised - only wanted the basics like gender, race, age, diagnosis codes, treatment codes etc). We would also update the patient system to collect any new data.
In May we would now run the new version of the reporting software and send out the new format files to the health authorities and would always get plaintive requests for the old format as they weren't ready yet. We couldn't because we were often now collecting data differently and our coding team was me for much of the time and I had other tasks to get on with.
The point is that what should have happened is that the NHS would tell the labs to provide data in their format and then make it easy to parse into the NHS database.
I'm wondering if the labs are all using their own formats or something and Excel parsing is being used as a quick way to get the data consistent. Much better for the parsing to be done by the labs as the volumes are lower then make it easier just to read into the central database.
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The problem wasn't the individuals labs. It was the bringing together of all the different sets of results and using an older spreadsheet format that caused the problem.
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The issue was caused by the way the agency brought together logs produced by the commercial firms paid to carry out swab tests for the virus.
They filed their results in the form of text-based lists, without issue.
PHE had set up an automatic process to pull this data together into Excel templates so that it could then be uploaded to a central system and made available to the NHS Test and Trace team as well as other government computer dashboards.
The problem is that the PHE developers picked an old file format to do this - known as XLS.
As a consequence, each template could handle only about 65,000 rows of data rather than the one million-plus rows that Excel is actually capable of.
And since each test result created several rows of data, in practice it meant that each template was limited to about 1,400 cases. When that total was reached, further cases were simply left off.
Until last week, there were not enough test results being generated by private labs for this to have been a problem - PHE is confident that test results were not previously missed because of this issue.
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1,400 cases might seem a small number, but I should imagine when you add all the contacts for each case, then the total number of contacts will obviously be a lot bigger.