A Non-application-specific Approach to Medical Software Design

Abstract

A growing demand exists for an inexpensive microcomputer software package to enable clinicians to collect, maintain and analyse medical data in a variety of situations such as disease registers, research projects and patient management systems. Although there are a number of comprehensive database packages available commercially, these are aimed mainly at the business world and hence are not ideally suited to the clinical situation. In general these packages have very limited facilities for dealing with, and analysing non-numerical information. Craft (Clinical Retrieval Analysis and Follow-up Template) is a clinically oriented fully indexed data management system which has been developed by both clinical and computer staff in an attempt to fill this gap.