Dennis J. McShane

Appiacations, of mfdlog, a microcomputer-based system for time-oriented clinical data

MEDLOG is a clinical data management and analysis system specifically designed to efficiently handle time-oriented clinical data. It employs the basic design of the TOD (Time Oriented Database) system developed at Stanford University. File transpositioning allows very rapid retrieval of data for analysis purposes, so that statistical analysis of research data can be performed on-line. MEDLOG is a completely interactive, menu-driven system. All system functions, including selection of complex time oriented patient encounter subsets, can be performed without programming. The paper discusses applications of the MFDLOG system to medical research projects involving longitudinal data, including multi-center cancer trials and a large chronic disease databank.

The chronic disease data bank-the ARAMIS experience

The authors provide an overview of the American Rheumatism Association Medical Information System (ARAMIS), a national database and database management system containing parallel longitudinal clinical data sets from 17 rheumatic disease centers. 22 000 patients and 183000 observation time points are represented. The database contains measures of five dimensions-death, disability, discomfort, iatrogenic, and economic-and subdivisions of each dimension that provide a measure of the impact of the disease. The database management system is the MEDLOG time oriented database statistical software system. It runs on MOS-DOS-compatible microcomputers MEDLOGs file limits and abilities are described, and future directions for ARAMIS and MEDLOG are briefly covered. >