A dBASE III surgical pathology reporting and encoding microcomputer system.

The authors have developed a menu-driven dBASE III system for surgical pathology reporting and encoding in Systematized Nomenclature of Medicine (SNOMED). The system requires no knowledge of dBASE and is readily installed on any IBM-standard personal computer equipped with a fixed disk. The use of dBASE memo fields provides the integration of word processing and database functions. Preliminary gross examination reports are automatically accompanied by data from former cases on the same patient. Patient demographics, SNOMED codes, and final diagnoses are stored on the fixed disk; complete reports are saved on floppy diskettes. Cases can be retrieved by patient name, surgical number, or SNOMED codes. Daily work lists, frozen section-final diagnosis correlations, turnaround time reports, and listings of incomplete cases are easily obtained. Cytologic results can also be entered, allowing automatic correlation with surgical cases.