Structured organization of clinical data bases

Abstract

The health care delivery system is under strong pressures from several sides. Many of these pressures derive from the demand for a more comprehensive range of health services and from the increased complexity of disease and treatment patterns. Since medical science has provided tools to manage many of the once common diseases, it now has to cope with problems of less well understood origin and course. The practicing physician is faced with an information explosion of major dimensions and a gap between scientific knowledge in a basic form and its practical application at the bedside.