In 1977, the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology at UT Southwestern Medical School was awarded a 5-year grant by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation to study the outcomes of perinatal-neonatal care in Dallas County, Texas.
The plan was to access data from the five major obstetrical services at hospitals within Dallas County, including Parkland Memorial Hospital (PMH), which together were responsible for over 20,000 births per year. A committee that included faculty in Obstetrics, Pediatrics/Neonatology and Computer Science as well as Nursing from Labor and Delivery and the Neonatal ICU at PMH was organized. Their task was to determine which maternal-neonatal data to collect and to define each data point in order to enhance consistency in data collection.
Data were then collected and entered by 10-12 research nurses trained in Obstetrics and Neonatal care. The computerized database was originally created as part of the Maternal and Neonatal Data Acquisition Transmission and Evaluation (MANDATE) project.
Dr. Charles Rosenfeld and colleagues welcome Parkland Hospital’s second set of quintuplets in 1998 along with the babies’ proud parents. 
A preterm infant snuggles with her mother in the Neonatal ICU. In 1985, when funding was no longer available from the 5-year study, the database was reassessed, reformatted and revalidated in order to collect data at PMH and only for all NICU admissions.
A single research nurse was responsible for data collection and input using well-defined data points accessible within the chart notes, laboratory results, and assigned ICD-codes at discharge. The overall purpose of the revised database was to permit the annual assessment of neonatal outcomes including morbidity and mortality, to determine experiences within the NICU, and to provide data for initiating clinical studies and grants applications. The database is approved by the Institutional Review Board (IRB) of the UT Southwestern Medical Center.
To this day, the Parkland NICU Database serves as a resource for both clinicians and researchers, and is used to improve the care of infants in the Parkland Neonatal ICU.
Since 1977, there have been 6-7 faculty members responsible for maintaining the database and providing the annual assessment of care at PMH. Moreover, there have only been four research nurses responsible for the collection and input of the data into the database, which has been updated several times. The broadest analysis of the database was published by Kaiser et al who examined race- and gender-related outcomes from 1977 through 2000. Additional studies are ongoing.