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Arch Intern Med. 2004;164:1246-1248.

	Since this article does not have an abstract, we have provided the first 150 words of the full text and any section headings.

In 1990, my colleagues and I published a brief Commentary in the ARCHIVES titled "The Present Medical Database Needs Reorganization: It's Time for a Change!"¹ That article described a "new" database, which we called the "problem and/or risk factor assessment–oriented database," formatted better to assist health care providers in the process of gathering data from well persons. The process used to create the "new" database was partially described in the original publication.¹ Briefly, because we implemented the requirement that first-year University of Michigan medical students start learning how to perform the patient interview on healthy elderly persons during the first semester of medical school, we were required to come up with a revised database enabling them to take a history in the absence of a disease. That need resulted in the database's being revised to address the chronological evolution of disease risk rather than to initiate the clinical analysis of . . . [Full Text of this Article]

John N. Sheagren, MD
Chicago, Ill