Computerized surveillance of diabetic patient/health care delivery system interfaces

DIASURV is a computerized surveillance program developed to monitor the interaction of a large cohort of diabetic patients with a tertiary care institution. The input of this simple program consists of a file of diabetic patients, the daily census of hospital inpatients, and the daily census of hospital outpatients. Written in COBOL, the program consists of edit and file-maintenance components and inpatient and outpatient search components. The output is a daily listing of all inpatient (x- = 60) and outpatient transactions (x- = 20) for the cohort of 1,800 patients. The output also summarizes previous exposures of patients to specific bedside and classroom activities in diabetes education. DIASURV has a variety of applications in terms of organization of teaching efforts and facilitated access to a limited amount of patient management information.