Current Status of Computerization of Multiple Sclerosis Clinical Data for Research in Europe and North America

The collection of symptoms and signs and the storage and retrieval of data are the basis of medical activities. More recently, emphasis has been placed on standardization of medical records. Although subtleties in clinical findings may be lost, the paramount advantage in standardization (use of a common language) is to render individual records immediately comparable to each other. A further pivotal step has been the electronics resolution. Computers are perfect devices for recording, storing, and retrieving data. Practical consequences of the combination of standardization and computerization are numerous. Medical practice is easier owing to the rapid access to the relevant features of the records and their display in a convenient, compact, and attractive format. Within and among centers using the same standards, selection of appropriate files, exchange of data, and comparisons of individual studies are made easy. But another critical issue is the possibility for pooling files from various centers for common studies. Information about a critical mass of patients thus becomes available and enables one to address classic questions with more efficiency than with conventional records [1-6], but also allows one to ask new questions that could not have been addressed at the level of a single center [7-10]. Requisites for a clinical database. For a database system to be accepted by a medical community, there are several important conditions that must be established in advance. This list may be considered guidelines for establishing and using a clinical database in medicine. Mandatory conditions would be: 1. A clear definition of and an agreement on data to be entered in the system must be obtained. This process needs a collaborative effort of the future users before the building of the program. 2. The design of the system must be flexible enough to accept new data and the addition …