Upgrading the cardiac patient record in the coronary care unit into the new millennium

Since the early 1980s, an automatic patient discharge letter program has existed in our coronary care unit (CCU) ward. This program was terminal-oriented and used by the attending cardiologists. Although several revisions have been made since 1983, a need existed to renew this terminal-based application, and therefore we upgraded the software to the Microsoft Windows operating system. We decided to maintain the existing CCU database, which was written in the MUMPS language, and to develop a Windows-based front-end The new application was developed in Delphi and a special gateway was made between Delphi and the MUMPS database. The software replaced the previous one successfully at the beginning of 2000 and the reactions of the users were positive. The combination of coded information and automatic generation, which proved to powerful 20 years ago, still turned out to be a modern and powerful tool in this new millennium.