[An information system for hospital hygiene. I. Data acquisition, data bank retrieval and presentation of data].

Aiming at efficient control or prevention of hospital infection it is necessary to provide the clinician immediately with his patient's relevant microbiological data, i.e. relative frequency and susceptibility patterns of species. Therefore an information system for acquisition, on-line storage and retrieval of infection control data was developed together with Institut für Krankenhausausbau of Technische Universität Berlin. The output from the database of microbiological isolates is presented in diagrams for easy evaluation by the clinician and produced either on a graphic color display or on a plotter. The system was developed using a database which was set up retrospectively including about 5000 microbiological isolates from about 1000 intensive care patients of a Berlin university hospital from a period of 18 months. The first communication covers input and output of the data processing system by way of examples. Acquisition of isolates is facilitated at a display terminal using a program to check the data entry and to store the correct data record in a multiple index key oriented file system. Retrieval may be defined either selectively by means of keys, i.e. code of species, specimen or patient entry number or searching across the whole file and for given time periods. One may determine as well to retrieve only data records including test results from selected antibiotics.