Management of prenatal care information: integration of the problem list and clinical comments.

To improve the functionality of our MAternal Record System (MARS), we reviewed the clinical problems entered into the MARS database from approximately 2800 patient records and interviewed representative clinicians about their use of the Clinical Comments and Problem List sections of MARS. Problems were assigned a unique term that corrected for spelling, spacing, synonyms, and abbreviation variations. Analysis of these terms suggested design changes that would increase the number of unique entries into the Problem List, including (1) modifications in the automated problem entry functions within MARS and (2) integration of the Problem List and Clinical Comments sections.