Melton L J
Department of Health Sciences Research, Mayo Clinic Rochester, Rochester, Minnesota 55905, USA.
Mayo Clin Proc. 1996 Mar;71(3):266-74. doi: 10.4065/71.3.266.
The Rochester Epidemiology Project is a unique medical records-linkage system that encompasses the care delivered to residents of Rochester and Olmsted County, Minnesota. It is the creation of Dr. Leonard T. Kurland, who envisioned the population-based data resource that would result from combining the clinical documentation developed by the Mayo Clinic with that obtained by other community providers, most notably the Olmsted Medical Group and its affiliated Olmsted Community Hospital. Kurland built on the Mayo unit medical record system that was designed by Dr. Henry S. Plummer in 1907 and on the medical and surgical indexing systems introduced by Dr. Joseph Berkson in 1935. By affording access to details of the medical care given to local residents, the Rochester Epidemiology Project is able to provide accurate incidence data for almost any serious condition and to support population-based analytic studies of disease causes and outcomes. Thus, epidemiologic studies of a wide array of disorders have been possible and have culminated in almost 900 publications since the system was organized in 1966. Olmsted County is one of the few places in the world where the occurrence and natural history of diseases can be accurately described and analyzed in a defined population for a half century or more.
罗切斯特流行病学项目是一个独特的医疗记录关联系统，涵盖了为明尼苏达州罗切斯特市和奥尔姆斯特德县居民提供的医疗服务。该项目由伦纳德·T·库兰德博士创建，他设想了这样一个基于人群的数据资源，它将梅奥诊所生成的临床文档与其他社区医疗服务提供者（最著名的是奥尔姆斯特德医疗集团及其附属的奥尔姆斯特德社区医院）所获得的文档相结合。库兰德以1907年由亨利·S·普拉默博士设计的梅奥单位医疗记录系统以及1935年由约瑟夫·伯克森博士引入的医学和外科索引系统为基础。通过提供获取当地居民医疗护理细节的途径，罗切斯特流行病学项目能够为几乎任何严重疾病提供准确的发病率数据，并支持基于人群的疾病病因和转归分析研究。因此，自1966年该系统组建以来，对各种疾病的流行病学研究成为可能，并最终发表了近900篇论文。奥尔姆斯特德县是世界上为数不多的几个地方之一，在那里可以在一个特定人群中对疾病的发生情况和自然史进行长达半个世纪或更久的准确描述和分析。
