Registers, recalls and reminders.

General practitioners care for a large number of patients who require a wide range of preventive care procedures. Most patients attend at least once each year, providing an opportunity to offer and/or perform indicated preventive care. If these opportunities are taken, only a few patients will ever need to be recalled for preventive care. Reliable, thorough and consistent opportunistic offering of preventive care depends on having an efficient information system that reminds the doctor of what care is due. Manual systems are too expensive to use for this task because of their high labour costs. Recalling all patients routinely for preventive care is inefficient, expensive and unrewarding. Electronic medical record systems can remind doctors of when preventive interventions are due and generate recall notices at the lowest cost.