• A brief description of the three voluntary, graduated levels of SEMOR compliance called Baseline, Enhanced, and Comprehensive.
  
• A slide show describing SEMOR is available here. These twenty (20) slides are part of a lecture given by Larry Thibos at the AAO meeting in San Diego in December, 1994.
  
• A technical description of the design of the pilot project.
  
• A brief history of the project is presented in the form of original documents.
  
• Read the SEMOR abstract for a closer look at the methods and results of the project.
  
• There is also a mini-tutorial in picture form on how to use the Internet to interact with a database. This is the nuts and bolts description of how SEMOR data are collected via email, and distributed by a webserver.

'A WEEK IN THE LIFE OF OPTOMETRY': A STUDY OF CLINICAL PROCEDURES AND PATIENT DEMOGRAPHICS FOR A.S.C.O. INSTITUTIONS

The SEMOR task force was formed by ASCO in June, 1993 to recommend Standards for Electronic Management of Optometric Records. This taskforce has articulated a vision of using the Internet to create a 'virtual research laboratory' to foster collaborative optometric research. The current study was designed as a pilot project to demonstrate the feasibility of collecting optometric data from a widely distributed group of institutions. Our goal was to answer two questions:

• 1) what kinds of optometric procedures are being done in university-based optometric clinics? and
• 2) on what kinds of patients?

Each participating institution (IU, OSU, PCO, SCCO, UAB, UH, UW), recorded demographic information (age, race, gender) and a list of clinical procedures performed on each patient seen during the week of 18-July-94. At the end of each day, the data were sent as an electronic mail message to a collection site (IU) for processing and analysis. The results showed that the average number of patients/week per institution was 538, of which 40% were male and 60% female. The relative frequency of ethnic categories was:

• native American=.05%
• Black=23%
• Hispanic=3%
• Pacific Islander or Asian=1%
• White=31%
• Unknown=41% (Unknown includes 'Unreported' and 'Other')

Statistics of the national age distribution were:

• Mean=41.7
• S.D.=21.9
• Mode=47
• Skewness=-.095

The most commonly performed procedures were different at each institution.