Clinical applications of computers in office practice.

The power to store and integrate vast amounts of information and to extract selected data rapidly makes the computer an obvious tool for physicians, particularly for family physicians, who attend to a large number of patients, deal with a great variety of problems, and provide comprehensive and long-term continuity of care. The ideal office computer system should be designed to permit each practice to select the business and clinical modules appropriate to that practice. The clinical modules would need to be sufficiently flexible to allow every physician to define the parameters he or she would wish to monitor for surveillance or health maintenance programs. There is an urgent need to arrive at some national consensus regarding the integration of clinical and business functions for office computers, particularly in family practice. Some pioneering physicians have shown the way. It now remains to translate the concepts into a generalizable system that would be suitable for a variety of settings.