Relationship between work environment and anamnestic health status. Use of predictors, indicators and indices for the evaluation of medical and environmental factors.

Experience with computerized medical record systems in handling medical data in hospital and health screening environments has led to the development of a new approach to the evaluation of medical data. Predictors and indicators quantify the "information value" of medical data and can, theoretically, do so for all types of data. This paper describes the methodology and presents the results obtained when the technique was applied to the anamnestic data of the medical history and environmental data about the conditions in the work environment. Over 4,000 individuals who underwent multiphasic health screening were used as a data base for this study. From these 4,000 persons 3,164 were used for the calculation of anamnestic predictors and indicators and 1,013 for the environmental predictors and indicators. Anamnestic environmental indices were calculated upon 77 test individuals so as to correlate the association and dependence of the two indices.