RESUMO
OBJECTIVE: To present the design and setting up of a computerised data base for primary care. DESIGN: A descriptive crossover study. The recording lasted a year. SETTING: Gómez Acebo Health Centre in Madrid. Primary Care. PATIENTS AND OTHER PARTICIPANTS: The whole of the health centre catchment population, comprising 14,407 people, as well as 20 doctors and nurses. INTERVENTIONS: The consultations of ten doctors and ten nurses at the health centre were computerised. The computer programme, language-designed for inter-related data bases, linked four data bases (users, chronic illnesses, medicines, and the diagnosis and treatment record-sheet). The population under study comprised 14,407 people over one year, 1993. MEASUREMENTS AND MAIN RESULTS: The users file held the data of 14,407 people. 7,867 of these contained 23,993 chronic diagnoses with 12,405 treatments. The commonest diagnosis groups were: cardiovascular, psychiatry, endocrinology and articulations. The therapeutic groups with most prescriptions were C (cardiovascular), A (digestive and metabolic), N (nervous system) and R (respiratory). Daily expenditure in medicines was 634,207 pesetas. CONCLUSIONS: The main contribution of this computerised data base is to be able to analyse the associations between pathologies and their associated treatments, along with the pharmacological cost per primary care transaction, interactions and adverse side-effects.