One thing I didn’t expect when starting SQL was how much it would change the way I see data.
As pharmacists, we’re used to patient charts, medication profiles, and lab reports; often presented as separate pieces. SQL forces you to think in tables and relationships:
- A “medication orders” table.
- A “lab results” table.
- A “patient demographics” table.
Learning about joins showed me how these pieces could be connected. Even though I’m still working with mock data, I can already imagine:
- Linking a patient’s lab results with their active medication orders for quick dosing checks.
- Merging allergy lists with prescription histories to catch potential issues early.
- Summarizing monthly medication use per ward for audit purposes.
It’s a shift from reading isolated data points to thinking about how data flows, that’s exciting for both learning and future clinical applications.