Abstract

The authors have been developed a menu-driven FoxBASE system for surgical pathology reporting and automatic encoding in Systematized Nomenclature of Medicine. The system requires no prior knowledge of FoxBASE and is readily installed on any IBM or it's compatible personal computer. Working sheet generation is automatically accompanied by data from previous cases on the same patient. Important data which include patient name, age, sex, surgical number, hospital unit number and encoded diagnoses, are stored on the hard disk permanently; complete reports are saved on floppy diskettes. Cases can be retrieved by patient name, surgical number, hospital unit number and SNOMED codes within 0.1 second. Daily work lists and listings of incomplete cases are easily obtained. This FoxBASE system has been in use for 1 year and 6 months and resulted in increased efficiency of retrieval and gathering of basic information for specific study, cost effectiveness, markedly diminished workload of typist and very short wasting time during complete restoration of data file for hard disk failure.

• Keywords: Personal computer;Surgical pathology;Pathology report;Encoding;SNOMED code;