The Patient Medical Record as a Database

An early real-time filing system for medical records at King's College Hospital soon demonstrated a need for planning patient-based information on a grand scale. The filing system was adequate for the early real-time applications but soon all kinds of patient-based batch systems began to appear, and even real-time applications acquired their own archive files. This fragmentation of related data sets suggests a database solution. Computerised patient records may be a 'natural' for database technology since there is so much replication of data across the information systems in the health care services. The content of a referral letter, say, from General Practitioner to Clinic, or vice versa, should largely be recorded somewhere already. There are numerous examples of this kind both within the units of health care—hospitals, health centres, etc.—and across them.