Until October, 1984 the computer and data management aspects of the Stroke Data Bank and Traumatic Coma Data Bank included three entities: 1) a Data Bank Maintenance Center (DBMC) supported by a contract with Beth Israel which provided storage and retrieval support for the combined data bases in each of the data banks 2) a """"""""front-end"""""""" micro-computer system supported by a contract with RLR Associates and 3) CAS which coordinated all of the data management aspects of the projects. The contract for a DBMC at Beth Israel was terminated on September 30, 1984, at the convenience of the government, and there has been a restructuring of the described activities. The coordination of the data management activities for the data banks, as well as design of the data storage, data exploration, and system enhancements are the responsibility of CAS, which is acting now as the DBMC or coordinating center for the data banks. The data now physically reside at NIH (DCRT) in SAS data sets, after they are transmitted from the clinical centers. The RLR Associates' contract workscope has been expanded to include actual programming of the software for DCRT and for transmission of data from the centers to DCRT. RLR Associates will maintain the front-end aspects of the system. In addition, the analytic retrieval functions formerly supported by the Beth Israel DBMC are being transferred to the individual clinical center sites. A patient tracking system was designed, developed and implemented for the Stroke Data Bank. This system, in which data are directly entered by the clinical centers into DCRT, monitors the flow of patients from entry into the study, through follow-up. A similar system is in the design phase for the Traumatic Coma Data Bank.
