Computer Support For Muscular Subaortic Stenosis Research

Data collection and data management are time consuming aspects of clinical research, often occupying much of the time that a physician spends in doing clinical investigation. For retrospective studies, backlogging data from old charts is a tedious process subject to errors. Even in prospective studies it can be difficult to maintain rigid adherence to data collection protocols. This paper describes data management procedures designed to overcome these problems in a large clinical research project on muscular subaortic stenosis. Data collection forms have been designed. A data-independent database management system on a minicomputer is being used to support the database. Information can be accessed as required using a query language and report generator.