Ashton Tate's dBASE III has been adapted to store patient data for both medical and administrative purposes by the Department of Ophthalmology of Children's Hospital National Medical Center. The program is run on an IBM-PC microcomputer and stored on twin Iomega 10 megabyte cartridge disks. The advantages of this system include ready availability of both software and hardware, relative ease of customization, simplicity of use, and modest cost.