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Environmentally Oriented Medical Record (ENORMED)

Introduction

The design of the Environmentally Oriented Medical Record (ENORMED), related to Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease has been completed. Shortly the Record will be presented to the Regional Scientific Committee of Tuscany (Italy) which has been involved and will help in the testing phase.

Methodology

To create an Environmentally Oriented Medical Record (ENORMED), focused on ecological problems, means to incorporate into the General Medical Record - the physicians' daily working tool
- a section of pre-coded fields relevant to the risk factors linked to the living and working environment (selected according to prevalence, seriousness, and geographical location).

Future

The study verified that the Medical Record is practicable but it presupposes that GPs will be fully involved in utilising it.

The Record will have to be integrated with the prepare archives or computer files that GPs are already using. It will need to be made available on software that would be distributed nationally and internationally.

Eventually, at least on a national level at first, the electronic data supplied by individual doctors using this software would be linked to a central system which would:

• allow the wide-scale collection of homogeneous research data;
• provide elaboration and diffusion of an official diagnostic register;
• monitor the diagnoses;
• retrain GPs relative to the environmental aspects linked to prevention and therapy;
• result in patient health education about both primary and secondary means of prevention.

The evaluation of all the data obtained will lead to much greater knowledge of this aspect of health and will, at the same time, have both diagnostic and preventive applications.

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