Search AMIA.org

With the advent of hospital payment by diagnosis-related group (DRG), length of stay (LOS) has become a major issue in hospital efforts to control costs. Because the Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center (CPMC) has had above-average LOSs for many DRGs, the authors tested the hypothesis that a computer-generated informational message directed to physicians would shorten LOS.

Evaluate the performance of a continuous-speech interface to a decision support system.

To develop a representational schema for clinical data for use in exchanging data and applications, using a collaborative approach.

Develop a continuous-speech interface that allows flexible input of clinical findings into a medical diagnostic application.

To investigate the issues raised in applying a preliminary version of the GALEN compositional concept reference (CORE) model to a series of radiographic reports, and to demonstrate that the same underlying concept model could be used in conjunction with both a detailed, fine-grained model of medical records based on that used in the PEN&PAD project and with other more conventional medical-record models.

Interactive laserdiscs are of limited value in large group learning situations due to the expense of establishing multiple workstations. The authors implemented an alternative to laserdisc video by using indexed digital video combined with an expert system. High-quality video was captured from a laserdisc player and combined with waveform audio into an audio-video-interleave (AVI) file format in the Microsoft Video-for-Windows environment (Microsoft Corp., Seattle, WA). With the use of an [...]

This article summarizes the origins of informatics, which is based on the science, engineering, and technology of computer hardware, software, and communications. In just four decades, from the 1950s to the 1990s, computer technology has progressed from slow, first-generation vacuum tubes, through the invention of the transistor and its incorporation into microprocessor chips, and ultimately, to fast, fourth-generation very-large-scale-integrated silicon chips. Programming has undergone a parallel transformation, from cumbersome, first-generation [...]

The introduction by the Health Care Financing Administration, in 1993, of separate conversion factors for "medical" and "surgical" services to be used in calculating Medicare charges would ordinarily necessitate the use of year-specific software source code. By designing the system to utilize macro-substitution of the year in the names of Current Procedural Terminology for Physicians Code databases, database fields, and system variables, it is possible to calculate Medicare charges without [...]