Query Reports from comma separated JSON mysql field - php

Question

this is my first question. Apologies if I don't conform with the required rules. I have tried my best and
Problem--
I have a problem with a project am working on. It is medical based. I have these three tables that I need to get reports from
DB structure--
diseaseTable which has columns
diseaseID | diseaseName
diseaseID stores an integer i.e 1, 3, 4,..
dieseaseName stores name of disease e.g Hypertension, Malaria, ..e.tc
I also have patientsTable which has these key columns
patientID - which is an autoincrement int
patientName - name of patient
created_at - date and time of registration of the patient
Lastly there is treatment table which contains
treatmentID -autoincrement int
patient - contains the id of the patient which is a foreing key of patientsTable
created_at and updated_at for timestamps
diseaseTreated (which is my column of interest) Stores values in json comma separated fields.
I have already checked all results from https://stackoverflow.com/search?q=mysql+comma+separated+fields but none seems to solve my problem. I have checked on ways to restructure mysql schema but i would have too many tables to store the diseases diagnised from each patient. In addition one patient might be diagnosed with multiple diseases and a disease can be added any time. I might have almost 100 of them. If ID of Hypertension is 1 and arthritis is 2 a patient with both will have the
diseaseTreated field with "1","2" in the treatment table
Solution Expected--
I need to get reports for first time a specific disease has been treated for the first time or second time and more i.e revisit for treatment of the same disease (if i wanted to know how many cases of hypertension are for the first time, and how many cases of hypertension are recurrent)
Example - New cases report
Disease | New Cases
Hypertension | 4
Example - Recurrent cases report
Disease | New Cases
Hypertension | 1
Arthritis | 2
Am using Laravel I have attempted a lot of solutions but this is what i find too close to get what I need: Others I have attempted was looping through different array results i have queried from the database by using joins but I havent posted them because they have yielded nothing important.
$diseaseID
$countedDiseaseCases = DB::select('select * from treatmentTable where JSON_CONTAINS(diseases, \'[\"'.$diseaseID.'\"]\')')
This one would get me the rows with a specific disease and by using php count() on the result I get an int as 3 which is OK but I haven't got to put it as I expect filter and differentiate new and recurrent cases.
Thanks,
Any suggestion will be highly appreciated

Answer 1

If the deseaseTreated column is json, couldn't you add an isNew key and when the patient comes in for a second visit, flip that key to false or something similar?
Now when you want to make the report you can get counts on all of them.
//example deseaseTreated value
{
"deseases": [
{
"deseaseID":"Value",
"isNew":Boolean,
...
},
{...}
]
}
$records = DB::select('select * from treatment');
$diseases = DB::select('select * from diseases');
foreach ($diseases as $disease) {
$disease['count_new'] = 0;
}
foreach ($records as $record) {
$json = json_decode($record['diseaseTreated']);
foreach ($json['diseases'] as disease_index) {
if ($disease_index['isNew']) {
foreach ($diseases as &$d) {
if ($d['diseaseID'] == $disease_index['diseaseID']) {
$d['count_new']++;
}
}
}
}