The Center for Biomedical Informatics
State University of Campinas, Brazil

Research Abstracts

One of the main obstacles to a wider acceptance and usefulness of computers in the physician's office is the differences between the inumerable medical specialties and sub-specialties, concern-ing the way of recording patient data and treatment protocols, deriving subsidiary information from clinical, administrative and financial data, etc. Many times, the health care profissional is reluctant to abandon his or her time-tested way of manual recording and retrieving clinical information, in favor of ausually inflexible computer-based system. This situation often leads to costly efforts, since many physicians who want to computerize their offices are forced to develop their own, specific systems. The CLINBASE/PC system was developed with the aim to reduce the effort of system customization to a minimum, in the area of inte-grated medical office automation. It is a stand-alone application package for IBM PC-compatible microcomputers, based on the con-cept of field programmability, i.e., the database files, data definitions and other user-dependent parameters are kept entirely separate from the program modules and can be easily created and altered using a special "key" programming module, which is, in reality, a kind of applications generator, since it is a tool for maintaining a central data dictionary, creating input and output forms, menus, database schemas, etc. The system comprises several modules: problem-oriented medical record management, self-administered clinical history taking, computer-aided medical decision making, patient communication (pre-defined medical reports, letters, adhesive labels, etc.), appointments management, literature and slides databases, etc. The medical record is composed of a master patient record (indexed by name or ID code) and up to 20 other different files, which can be entirely laid-out by the users, according to their needs.

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Last Updated: March 2, 1996

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