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This paper describes the ways in which encounter data from the family practice teaching units of the Department of Family Medicine, University of Western Ontario, have been used for teaching, service, and research. The fact that family physicians may deal with several problems at one visit is emphasized, as is the need to report morbidity in terms of the population at risk, so that comparisons can be made with other work. The value of encounter data in studies of patient utilization and resident experience is noted. The validity of the data has been examined and the extent of underrecording assessed. The system has helped to encourage the spirit of inquiry in its users.

This paper describes the development of a system for recording encounter data in family practice. The system has been developed by the Department of Family Medicine, University of Western Ontario, and came about as a natural addition to a previously reported method for describing and defining a practice population. The system gathers information on each encounter and includes data concerning the patient, the provider, the location, and certain other details concerning the encounter, including all problems dealt with on that occasion. The storage and analysis of these data are carried out by a computer. The uses of such data are many, and some of them will be dealt with in the fourth and last paper in this series.

The gathering of information on the practice population is essential for practice monitoring, preventive medicine, and research. The minimum necessary information is the age and sex of individuals cared for in the practice. This allows the expression of age-sex specific morbidity rates for the at-risk population. In the Department of Family Medicine, University of Western Ontario, practice census information has been used to determine the suitable size for a teaching practice, the representativeness of our practices in terms of age, sex, residence location, and morbidity, and for the production of at-risk registers based on age and sex.

Information systems for family practice are vital in its development as an academic discipline, in the teaching and learning process which ultimately improves the quality of care, and in the planning processes which must be used to rationalize the distribution of scarce resources in the health-care field. The provision of sufficient data for these purposes demands a flexible system, generally one based on the computer as a data storing and analyzing tool. Such a system has been developed in the teaching practices of the Department of Family Medicine, University of Western Ontario; the methods employed and the uses for that system are to be described in a series of four papers. This first paper describes the methods developed for gathering demographic information on the practice population.