No clinical computing topic is being given more attention than that of computer basedrnmedical records. Efficient and effective healthcare depends upon accuraterninformation and timely decision. Computer-based medical records arernincreasingly becoming a necessary and critical tool in healthcare to achievernthose goals. This study aims at examining the current paper-based patient medical recordrnsystem at Butajira Hospital and develops a patient medical database. The mainrnobjective of the study is to propose and develop an improved and effectiverninformation system for patient medical record of Butajira Hospital. On the processrnof analyzing the existing system, document analysis and semi-structuredrninterview data collection methods have been implemented. Structured systemrnanalysis and prototype system designs had been selected as systemrndevelopment methodologies. Attempts were made to investigate problems withrnthe existing system and analyze requirements for the proposed system.rnThe study reveals that, the existing paper medical record system is subject tornseveral drawbacks. Potential misplacement, destruction, and storage spacernconsumption of patient charts, illegibility, inconsistency, incompleteness,rndisorganization and redundancy of information on the chart are major ones. Tornovercome these and other defects, and meet the analyzed requirements, arncomputer-based patient record system (CPR) has found to be the best solution.rnAs appropriate software packages for African or developing countries hospitalsrncannot be found off the shelf, to alleviate this problem, it was decided to developrna database in-house. A RDBMS 'Microsoft Access ' has been used to build arndatabase locally. The capturing format of clinical data is also a point of concernrnof the study. Both coded and free texts with narration are formats applied torncapture patient medical data in the database. Summary, within the database development, intuitive and easy to use interfaces have been created. Valuable recommendations have also been stated for better implementation of the proposed system.