Occasionally claims extracts will merge from multiple sources and include observations with and without the period.

In general, it is good practice to look at all of your date fields with counts (or another unit of measurement like dollars or member months) by year and month.

A null date can often get converted to 0 as data gets passed back and forth and what was missing becomes an actual date.

Freedman HealthCare's resident Data Analyst Rik Ganguly answers.