A system and method are provided for providing a moveable summary column for a patient based medical flow sheet. The summary column can provide various summations of the patient's data records for any time period depending on where the moveable summation column is placed. The summation of the various patient data depends on the summation parameters defined in the medical flow sheet. The summary column can be moved by the user to any spot in the patient data portion of the medical flow sheet to sum up different intervals of data. The moveable summation column will present summary data for each of the patient parameters as designated by the medical flow sheet developers depending on the placement of the summation column.