RFI: - Medical Records Archiving
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Dear All,
I need some help!
We are in process of re-organising our medical records. We have
patient paper notes for the past 15 years. We are a busy medical
research organisation with about 5,000 paediatric admissions an-
nually.
We would like to archive these notes electronically and be able
to retrieve the same by unique identifiers e.g. patient number,
and organise the records by date of admission (range) etc. Is
there anyone/organisation with ideas on where we could get such
a system?
RFI: Medical Records Archiving (2)
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Dear Christopher,
I realise this would be very good for your organisation. My un-
derstanding about the whole issue, as you described, is that in
your working environment, with such large numbers, you really
need a database, but you should also find a way of uniquely
identifying the patients for easy retrieval from the database.
You could advise our IT person or get a consultant to design a
database for your organisation. A simple database could be that
of MS Access with Visual Basic programming. I hope this will be
of help.
Lyazi Micheal Ivan
Data Analyst/Systems Administrator
Child Health and Development Centre
Makerere University
P.O Box 6717, Kampala, Uganda
Tel: +256-41-541-684/530-325
Fax: +256-41-531-677
Mobile: +256-77-515-807 mailto:lyazi@chdc-muk.com or mailto:lyazi1@yahoo.com http://www.chdc-muk.com
RFI: Medical Records Archiving (3)
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Hi Christopher
Such a request is organisational-specific. The complexity of the
system that you can design will depend on the kind and nature of
data you have been collecting, plus the use which you want to
put the collected data to. You have an option of developing and
customising a database system easily using EpiInfo
(http://www.cdc.gov/epiinfo/) or MS Access. However, you would
love considering SQL server or Oracle - considering the numbers
of records you collect annually, possibility that the database
size will expand as it will be in use for some years ahead plus
the limitations of MS Access. At the extreme, you'll surely need
to contract a DBA / software developer for the task.