During the past decade, our laboratory has developed and refined PaperChase, a program that provides rapid searches of over 1,500,000 citations from the medical literature and a Hospital Information System that has registered over 550,000 patients and provides hospital-wide access to recent transactions with the out-patient departments, hospital admitting, laboratories, radiology, and pharmacy. Based on this experience, we are developing PatientChase, an interactive search program modeled on PaperChase, that will enable users to find patients based on combinations of medical attributes. The project entails the development of a user interface, design of data files and search algorithms, and the programming of data analysis routines. We plan to offer PatientChase around-the-clock to medical providers and hospital administrators for purposes of patient care, research, and hospital management. The usages of PatientChase will be tracked by computer and through direct interview of users. PatientChase will be evaluated by how much it is used, by whom, the purposes and success of searches, and the benefits, if any, to patient care, research, and hospital management.
