Dear Ziad,

Your question is rather non specific, but I ve been through a similar experience with some bad memories.

Review medical records is not an easy task. First of all, the type of study

(for exemple a suvival analysis) is of extremem importance on how the data should be organized. Then you must decide what information should be extracted from the records. Going back to the records a second or third time is really frustrating and time consuming. In general for ARV, to register all the ARV combinations, with the start dates and end dates, all CD4 cell counts and Viral loads with their respective dates, all diagnosis of oportunistic infections and their respective dates of diagnosis. Also, you shlould consider making a separate data entry for each one of this data or all of them in the same data entry, if you have someone experience in this tipe of data analyis, the separate way will make easier to extract and type. To use the AUTOSEARCH LIST command in the check file will be of help. Also dont forget a field if the ARV is HAART or not and an outcome such as death and/or hospitalization and of course its date.

Good Luck, Pedro Brasil

----------------------------------------------------------------------

Message: 1 Date: Tue, 4 Mar 2008 10:16:56 -0800 From: epidata-list@lists.umanitoba.ca Subject: [EpiData-list] Using EpiData to review medical records To: epidata-list@lists.umanitoba.ca Message-ID: 897a5cf60803041016y396e0f9dwf0baa18ba3168469@mail.gmail.com Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1

Dear EpiDataLister, It is semi-technical question. I intend to review medical records retrospectively for patients on ARVs. It seems to be involving lot of papers to review their history to be able to enter them into EpiData. Meant to check if someone had similar experience to share how did you sort it out?

Thank you in advance and best regards ziad