[Personal laboratory data management system using optical card].

This paper describes the development and state of the medical optical card system. Recently, computerized medical information systems have been developed in many hospitals and they allow quick access and automatic processing of the patient's data in medical practice and research. However, the use of the information stored by such a system has been limited to each hospital while it is not rare for a patient to change hospitals. It is desirable to develop a personal medical data management system which allows the patient to carry his own medical records for a long period of time, and hospitals to share the information about the patient. The optical card is a transportable information medium with a large capacity. Since data are recorded optically with a laser beam, the card is tolerant to environmental factors such as static electricity, magnetism and impact which injure other transportable media such as IC card, magnetic stripe card and floppy disk. Therefore, the optical card suits our purpose. We developed a prototype of the medical optical card system. In our system, the card can contain character data, numerical data, two-valued image data and electrocardiographical data. In order to share laboratory data among different database systems, we defined a data descriptive language which enables complete and compact data description without any external code tables. The recorded patient data are presented in the original multi-window system, which allows the doctor to see any combination of any part of the patient's information simultaneously.