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To evaluate the impact of clinical decision support (CDS) tools on rates of vitamin D testing. Screening for vitamin D deficiency has increased in recent years, spurred by studies suggesting vitamin D's clinical benefits. Such screening, however, is often unsupported by evidence and can incur unnecessary costs.

The Global Alliance for Genomics and Health (GA4GH) created the Beacon Project as a means of testing the willingness of data holders to share genetic data in the simplest technical context-a query for the presence of a specified nucleotide at a given position within a chromosome. Each participating site (or "beacon") is responsible for assuring that genomic data are exposed through the Beacon service only with the permission of the [...]

MetaMap is a widely used named entity recognition tool that identifies concepts from the Unified Medical Language System Metathesaurus in text. This study presents MetaMap Lite, an implementation of some of the basic MetaMap functions in Java. On several collections of biomedical literature and clinical text, MetaMap Lite demonstrated real-time speed and precision, recall, and F1 scores comparable to or exceeding those of MetaMap and other popular biomedical text processing [...]

Every year, thousands of patients die waiting for disability benefits from the Social Security Administration. Some qualify for expedited service under the Compassionate Allowance (CAL) initiative, but CAL software focuses exclusively on information from a single form field. This paper describes the development of a supplemental process for identifying some overlooked but gravely ill applicants, through automatic annotation of health records accompanying new claims. We explore improved prioritization instead of [...]

The rise in the use of electronic health records (EHRs) and associated resources over the last decade is leading to the end of the paper medical record and all the risks associated with the use of a paper chart. However, there has not been a concomitant creation of a systematic oversight body that is specifically charged with ensuring the public's safety through the use of EHR knowledge resource tools or [...]

Access to patient data within the hospital or between hospitals is still problematic since a variety of information systems is in use applying different vendor specific terminologies and underlying knowledge models. Beyond, the development of electronic health record systems (EHRSs) is time and resource consuming. Thus, there is a substantial need for a development strategy of standardized EHRSs. We are applying a reuse-oriented process model and demonstrate its feasibility and [...]

In the summer of 2016 an international group of biomedical and health informatics faculty and graduate students gathered for the 16th meeting of the International Partnership in Health Informatics Education (IPHIE) masterclass at the University of Utah campus in Salt Lake City, Utah. This international biomedical and health informatics workshop was created to share knowledge and explore issues in biomedical health informatics (BHI).

Unique characteristics of nursing homes (NHs) contribute to high rates of inappropriate antibiotic use for asymptomatic bacteriuria (ASB), a benign condition. A mobile clinical decision support system (CDSS) may support NH staff in differentiating urinary tract infections (UTI) from ASB and reducing antibiotic days.

Blood transfusion is a highly prevalent procedure in hospitalized patients and in some clinical scenarios it has lifesaving potential. However, in most cases transfusion is administered to hemodynamically stable patients with no benefit, but increased odds of adverse patient outcomes and substantial direct and indirect cost. Therefore, the concept of Patient Blood Management has increasingly gained importance to pre-empt and reduce transfusion and to identify the optimal transfusion volume for [...]

Platelet transfusions are a cornerstone of therapy for patients who develop thrombocytopenia while undergoing Hematopoietic Stem Cell Transplantation (HSCT). Many patients who develop Platelet Transfusion Refractoriness (PTR) require HLA-matched platelets. Identifying these patients early could lead to better utilization of platelets as well as increased platelet counts. We built a SMART on FHIR visualization tool to aid the oncology, blood bank, and blood donor center teams in identifying these patients [...]