MEDIC: a language to process clinical data for elementary statistical purposes.

Abstract

A new language has been developed which is helpful for handling data, already collected and stored on disk, with the aim of producing reports of clinical interest. For each clinical data bank a dictionary is generated, which contains all information needed to fully identify each medical item (e.g., name, type, attributes, indexed/single value). Now the user can write programs in a very easy way using the statements of the MEDIC language which give him the possibility of powerfully filtering data, making calculations and producing reports. Data integrity is achieved by the fact that users can only accede to data from the data bank and cannot alter data or modify them on disk. A special emphasis has been given, when designing MEDIC, to the possibility of counting data which satisfy certain sets of conditions, and to special output functions, as histograms. Programs written in MEDIC language are processed by MEDIC generator, are immediately executable, and have the possibility of tracing/debugging (the tracing option is chosen when program is starting execution). At execution time the user chooses in a very easy way the rules of scanning data bank, for example, the whole data bank and single ranges of records.