Information technology in diabetes care 'Diabeta': 23 years of development and use of a computer-based record for diabetes care.

In this article we have stressed that a diabetes care information system should be useful to, usable and actually used by carers at the point of patient contact. Information resulting from such encounters should, at no extra cost, furnish the needs of communication, audit, research and management. Diabeta is a clinical record system for supporting the management of patients with diabetes. It has grown 'organically' within an academic clinical unit over a period of 23 years. It is used for each and every encounter with the clinicians in our diabetes team and as such, contains an immense amount of objective clinical experience. This experience can be interrogated very easily by computer-naive clinicians using a remarkable interactive program ('Datascan') which contains statistical procedures 'embedded' in the APL computer code, eliminating the need to 'export' the data into a statistical package. The latest PC-based version is incredibly fast and this immense amount of clinical experience can be carried around on a notebook PC and be available for exploration at any time. This makes 'evidence-based medicine' available in a remarkably flexible way since it shares the accumulated objective experience of literally 'dozens' of clinicians over a period which now extends to 23 years. It adds a completely new dimension to the term 'clinical experience' and is unattainable with manual records. It would be naive to assume that such systems are easy to design, build or implement, or that the initial capital outlay required will be small although costs are falling continuously. Medicine is a highly complex activity, the essential basis of which is human interaction. Introduction of a technology into this interaction requires sensitivity to the wishes and requirements of individuals, and protection of their exchanges from third parties. The potential of computers in diabetes care is so great that these issues must be addressed through continuing research, development, evaluation and funding of new systems. This must be led by the medical profession not the computer industry.