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This pilot study explores the impact of a health topics overview (HTO) on reading comprehension. The HTO is generated automatically based on the presence of Unified Medical Language System terms. In a controlled setting, we presented health texts and posed 15 questions for each. We compared performance with and without the HTO. The answers were available in the text, but not always in the HTO. Our study (n=48) showed that [...]

To study the effects of using a population-based informatics system for osteoporosis screening and treatment in women aged 65 years or older.

Objective To determine whether a diabetes case management telemedicine intervention reduced healthcare expenditures, as measured by Medicare claims, and to assess the costs of developing and implementing the telemedicine intervention. Design We studied 1665 participants in the Informatics for Diabetes Education and Telemedicine (IDEATel), a randomized controlled trial comparing telemedicine case management of diabetes to usual care. Participants were aged 55 years or older, and resided in federally designated medically [...]

Maintaining a large controlled biomedical vocabulary requires ensuring the content's internal consistency. This is done through rules, specified by the vocabulary's curators, which denote how the vocabulary's concepts should be defined. When individual organizations deploy such vocabularies, local concepts are typically added and linked to concepts in the main vocabulary: the process of maintaining and linking local content should follow the same rules. The operation of content-maintenance software can be [...]

Clinicians face an increasing volume of biomedical data. Assessing the efficacy of systems that enable accurate and timely clinical decision making merits corresponding attention. This paper discusses the multiple-reader multiple-case (MRMC) experimental design and linear mixed models as means of assessing and comparing decision accuracy and latency (time) for decision tasks in which clinician readers must interpret visual displays of data. These tools can assess and compare decision accuracy and [...]

De-identified medical records are critical to biomedical research. Text de-identification software exists, including "resynthesis" components that replace real identifiers with synthetic identifiers. The goal of this research is to evaluate the effectiveness and examine possible bias introduced by resynthesis on de-identification software.

There has been a consistent concern about the inadvertent disclosure of personal information through peer-to-peer file sharing applications, such as Limewire and Morpheus. Examples of personal health and financial information being exposed have been published. We wanted to estimate the extent to which personal health information (PHI) is being disclosed in this way, and compare that to the extent of disclosure of personal financial information (PFI).

An object identifier (OID) has a central utility in providing a traceable source for the meaning of an identifier appearing in a cross-system communication. The views in this paper illustrate the problems with using the present OID registration system as a reliable source for the identifier, the confusion that the use of an OID introduces in messages, and the redundancy that the OID introduces at the expense of increased message [...]

Healthcare is increasingly dependent upon information technology (IT), but the accumulation of data has outpaced our capacity to use it to improve operating efficiency, clinical quality, and financial effectiveness. Moreover, hospitals have lagged in adopting thoughtful analytic approaches that would allow operational leaders and providers to capitalize upon existing data stores. In this manuscript, we propose a fundamental re-evaluation of strategic IT investments in healthcare, with the goal of increasing [...]

Mayo Clinic's Enterprise Data Trust is a collection of data from patient care, education, research, and administrative transactional systems, organized to support information retrieval, business intelligence, and high-level decision making. Structurally it is a top-down, subject-oriented, integrated, time-variant, and non-volatile collection of data in support of Mayo Clinic's analytic and decision-making processes. It is an interconnected piece of Mayo Clinic's Enterprise Information Management initiative, which also includes Data Governance, Enterprise [...]