The Origin of Information: Registers and Health Information Systems

Abstract

Let us go back to Chap. 1 and in particular to Sect. 1.2 and have another look at the Register of Consultations of a Commune Health Station. In order to explain the basic ideas we reproduce below, as Table 11.1, a very simplified version of a page of this register. The columns “Insured or free of charge”, “Profession”, “Ethnicity”, “Place of treatment”, “Person consulted” and “Remarks” were omitted and others modified; in particular the entries for “symptoms” and “treatments” were drastically shortened.

This lesson describes permanent sources of data and of epidemiologic indicators that are derived from data, in contrast to non-permanent data collection organized for a particular purpose within a particular study. It starts with a section on the underlying basic concepts.