A comprehensive abstraction tool for the out-patient setting

The authors describe a tool which facilitates the abstraction of clinical information in order to allow a comprehensive electronic clinical database to be built. Through the use of an effective CASE (computer-aided software engineering) tool and careful design of the GUI (graphical user interface), a software tool called ABSTRACT was developed in parallel with an extensive ambulatory data dictionary. The tool can be used to collect 10000 possible clinical variables for a given patient each time the patient encounters a medical provider. By employing object-oriented software techniques such as code sharing and code reusability, the time from design change to implementation was kept to a minimum, thus allowing the software design to remain flexible throughout its development. By involving the end-user community in the design process and by continuing to use their feedback up to field release, it was possible to produce a comprehensive tool which could be used to effectively abstract data from an out-patient chart