A scheme for assuring lifelong readability in computer based medical records.

Medical records must be kept over an extended period of time, meanwhile computer based medical records are renewed every 5-6 years. Readability of medical records must be assured even though the systems are renewed by different vendors. To achieve this, we proposed a method called DACS, in which a medical record is considered as an aggregation of documents.

Template-based data entry for general description in medical records and data transfer to data warehouse for analysis.

General descriptions in medical records are so diverse that they are usually entered as free text into an electronic medical record, and the resulting data analysis is often difficult. We developed and implemented a template-based data entry module and data analyzing system for general descriptions. We developed a template with tree structure, whose content master and entered patient's data are simultaneously expressed by XML.

Analysis of yearly variations in drug expenditure for one patient using data warehouse in a hospital.

Medical expense has grown rapidly in Japan. It could be caused by the increase of the patient number and the increase of medical expense per patient. We studied the latter factor on drug expenditure from 1996 to 2002 using the prescription data stored in the data warehouse of one hospital.

Creation of a master table for checking indication and contraindication of medicine from a knowledge base linked with a thesaurus.

To develop a system for checking indication and contraindication of medicines in prescription order entry system, a master table consisting of the disease names corresponding to the medicines adopted in a hospital is needed. The creation of this table requires a considerable manpower. We developed a Web-based system for constructing a medicine/disease thesaurus and a knowledge base.