Development of a Compuer Program for the Public Health Laboratory

THE LARGE VOLUME of data coming into a public health laboratory can serve many purposes provided there is a convenient system for retrieval and analysis of the infor¬ mation.A well-organized computer program may be the answer.Four general objectives of its use would be to (a) provide epidemiologic in¬ formation on disease distribution, (6) serve as a record of the tests done by the laboratory, (c) indicate geographic areas where control pro¬ grams are most needed, and (d) establish a sound statistical basis for budget preparation.The purpose of this paper is to report the ex¬ perience of the Wisconsin State Laboratory of Hygiene in the evolution of a computer program for its laboratory data.After 5 years of experimentation a promising method has resulted that appears to answer most of our needs.We hope that this report on that method will serve both as a stimulus to, and as a basis for, initiation of computer programs in other public health lab¬ oratories.We should like to see such programs tied into a nationwide information network that would collect, analyze, and cxchange laboratory data through a national center.tion to the usual environmental health and mi- crobiological services to the State health depart¬ ment, the laboratory offers to physicians, with¬ out charge except for a handliug fee in clinical chemistry, a varied and extensive menu of serv¬ ices.Included annually in these services are 50,000 throat cultures, 80,000 Papanicolaou tests for cervical cancer, and more than 100,000 tests in clinical chemistry.About a million tests are