Une technique de chainage chronologique de dossiers et exploitation du fichier obtenu: Application au controle du fonctionnement des stimulateurs cardiaques

Abstract The application of information processing to the study of the evolution of the patient's state requires the constituting of a file which contains the value of different items as functions of time. There are many methods for doing this and most of them appeal to the construction of a complex database. The technique presented in the paper tries to at first to constitute, for each patient, some records, of which every one corresponds to a determined ‘operation' (the term ‘operation' is taken in the wide sense; example: consultation, surgical intervention, …) then to link them according to the chronological order. It has the advantage of being easy so that it may be used even on minicomputers. Furthermore, the exploitation of the resultant data file is very easy. This method is well suited to problems such as the examination of the longitudinal investigations, the treatment of records of the patients who went through several operations, etc. The application presented here is the checking of the functioning of pacemakers. We wrote on a minicomputer MITRA 15/125 transferable general program (using FORTRAN IV exclusively), which allows one to carry out the linking and to exploit the resultant file. It is so designed that the addition of new procedures involved in new applications may be very easy.