Retrieval of information from medical records

Last year approximately thirty million patients were discharged from hospitals in the United States. Each left behind a medical record to be added to the more than half a billion records of hospitalizations already in the files of American hospitals. These records contain a vast amount of medical information of wide variety and an important reason for their retention is medical research. The Commission on Professional and Hospital Activities, through its major program, the Professional Activity Study, has been studying for the past nine years the problem of retrieval of information from these records for use in research. Through a system of voluntary participation on the part of hospitals the Commission has already established a library of more than five million abstracts of medical records and this research pool is growing at the rate of more than 1.8 million abstracts per year. Through research studies using this storehouse of data much has been learned about the variations in medical practice both among hospitals and among physicians in the same hospital. Examples of research studies (average hemoglobin values and over‐all transfusion rates) demonstrate the potential usefulness of this approach. Perhaps someday electronic machines, by using to a full extent this vast amount of information, will be able to detect and report automatically even subtle changes in medical practice.