Issues in the design of a clinical microbiology database within an integrated hospital information system

The LASTWORD hospital information system contains a clinical microbiology database which permits both review of patient reports and retrospective data searches using clinical and/or demographic criteria. The elements supporting this database are dictionary tables of coded phrases, a general purpose query language (Tandem ENFORM), an HL7 interface to a laboratory computer system, and long-term data storage of demographic, microbiology and other clinical data in a relational database.