Unit of Measure (UoM)

Suppose i've to build a report on medicines that a patient is given. Sometimes this medicine is taken as pill, sometimes it's given in mg, sometimes as another Unit of Measure. As i'm reading Kimball paragraph about UoM in the datawarehouse toolkit it's not clear to me that if i recalculate the semi addtive measure to a uniform measure, what's the point of this? Because what's the point of adding up the different medicines? In case of an order entry and a currency i can imagine that the measure should be unified and you can add things up but what if you have different medicines? I hope that someone give me some more insights on this problem.

Examples could be?: a uniform comparison between Medicine A and B? Which is more? Trend analysis over a period of time?

Thnx,
Hennie

It is commonly done in manufacturing, particularly CPG (consumer pakaged goods), to calculate 'case equivalents'. It would not make any sense to do it in your situation.

Well, that is a clear answer. A no go area. So i should store the UoM in the original format and let the user choose the correct medicine (and UoM)?!

Suppose that I have some medicine (or should i say drug) that could be equivalent to each other. Well, mostly they are in mg. Perhaps that is even not the problem...

hmmm. I'll go back to my client for further information.

Thnx
Hennie