University Medical Information Network (UMIN) has been developed by connecting all of the national university hospital host computers. Through this network, hospital personnel share in the benefits of various medical information services. We attempted to send/receive MSDOS drug information system files by UMIN. UMIN does not accept binary data, but the “ish file converter” has enabled us to convert binary data files to text files for uploading and downloading. New ADMICS (Advanced Drug Mixture Information & Consultation System) has been developed on FMR (Fujitsu) personal computers by investigating ADMICS files on PC-9800 (NEC) personal computers. A batch file made it possible to update ADMICS automatically and immediately with files downloaded from UMIN. UMIN is expected to facilitate collaboration among university hospitals in utilizing application programs and databases originally developed on MS-DOS at each university hospital.
