Establishing a medical research computer facility

We report on the design and implementation of a computer facility (called the Data Bank) for medical research. The system was designed to be accessible to medical researchers and their staff. Its chief requirements were ability to handle large volumes of data efficiently and be reasonably user-friendly, since most medical research staff members are computer-naive. We describe how we set-up a user friendly system and report on the problems we had in making it accessible. The chief problems were caused by difficult communication between computer staff and medical research staff. We discuss the ways we have attempted to overcome the problems.