Databases and Networks. The Benefit for Research and Quality Assurance in Patch Testing

The present chapter summarises several information technology (IT) applications in the research field of contact dermatitis intended to support the clinical management of patients and/or research. Today, due to the overwhelming speed of IT innovation, there seem to be few strictly technical problems. However, it seems to be an important issue to integrate IT into everyday work in such a way that it is not perceived as an intrusion, but rather as a support by its users. The starting point for a successful contact allergy research application is the implementation of user-friendly patch test software to document relevant parts of the patient’s history and patch test results. After an overview of the relevant issues, this presentation focuses on the usefulness of electronically collected data for quality control purposes within a patch test network. In this context, quality control is both an outcome and also a prerequisite for further use of this data for scientific purposes, e.g., surveillance of contact allergy or other dedicated analyses. The successful use of such databases generated by different networks is illustrated by several examples. As an aid in the daily management of contact dermatitis patients, a number of auxiliary sources of information are briefly outlined in the final section.