2004 Volume 24 Issue 3 Pages 383-390
The National Center for Child Health and Development(NCCHD) has developed a long-term follow-up database to utilize the electronic medical records for clinical research and hospital management purposes. In this study, we constructed a trial system to analyze data accumulated in the NCCHD database and conducted a epidemiological study from the perspective of pregnancy weight gain and low birth weight. From sampling data of pregnant women and neonates for the past twenty months, the results are 1) low-birth-weight is significantly related to the insufficient weight gain of pregnant women, 2) 77% of pregnant women do not meet the American Institute of Medicine(IOM) criteria. Electronic data is useful for epidemiological study since it facilitates the collection of detailed patient data for long-term follow-up period and allows labor saving and cost reduction. In the near future, we expect to apply this analysis method to large size data if we can build a shared network system for clinical data around NCCHD.