Interfacing anesthesiology operating room data with statistics software packages

During an operation, data is collected on operative events including start and stop times and on continuous data distributions such as heart rate, and blood pressure. This means that records from different operations are of different lengths since the amount of data collected depends on the length of the operation. Padding all records to the same length is a waste of disk space and processing time. In general statistical software packages require constant length records and much of the data is redundant and will not be used in the analysis. This paper discusses a method using a statistics package to format the operation records into one file