A medical microcomputer database management system.

The Patient Data Handler (PDH) is a general purpose, interactive, relational database management system (DBMS) which was created to store and retrieve the patient records stemming from a research project centering upon the genetic causes and diagnosis of concomitant deafness and blindness [1, 5]. This project has two main foci: deaf-blind syndrome delineation and identification, and computer-based diagnosis of deaf-blind syndromes. Patient evaluations in the syndrome delineation project provide reference cases for input into the computer-based diagnostic consultation system. The reference cases need to be stored in a DBMS in order to be accessed by specific disease criteria for use in the consultation system. The size and complexity of the application were beyond the capabilities of the available systems for the LSI-11103 microcomputer. The PDH was created to utilize to maximum advantage the coded character attributes of the genetic information and to operate upon the LSI 11/03 microcomputer. The purpose of this paper is to describe the PDH system and to demonstrate its usefulness with retrievals from the deaf-blind database.