A third set of publications was concerned with the analysis and extraction of selected information from electronic patient
registries, allowing the identification of risk factors and groups of at-risk patients and the obtainment of care-quality indicators and their comparison between different health units (23, 24).
The authors agreed that such systems could assist with evaluations of morbidity and patterns of drug prescription (25), allow managers to monitor compliance with conduct and norms regulated between different levels of care (26), and optimize the prevention and early detection of risk factors (27).
One limitation is the lack of studies evaluating the impact of the use of these systems on quality of care (11). Another
drawback is the lack of standardization among the different systems which reduces the usefulness of automatically generated indicators (28). When data entry is retrospective, there is a tendency to transfer the deficiencies of a manual registry to the computerized registry (29). It is often necessary to develop additional system tools, such as, for example, codification of the reasons for appointments (30).