Fourteen years' experience of management and use of the perinatal data-base system

Since 1973, we have been recording the data of all obstetric cases in our department in our original data-base system, which was created on the mainframe computer at the Tokyo University Hospital Computer Center. The purposes of this system are mainly for making summaries of patients, for retrieving information of cases to provide data for clinical investigations, and for collecting statistics. The data records consist of 225 items, including different kinds of perinatal information. Our data-base system has been useful in improving perinatal medicine, in clinical investigations, and in our daily work. But after 14 years of experience with it, we recognize the system has problems, namely: 1) How to summarize perinatal data to be used as a substitute for a patient history chart, and 2) How to update the data-base with a little change in format according to improvements of perinatal medicines.