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Health care information technology can be a means to improve quality and efficiency in the primary care setting. However, merely applying technology without addressing how it fits into provider workflow and existing systems is unlikely to achieve improvement goals. Improving quality of primary care, such as cancer screening rates, requires addressing barriers at system, provider, and patient levels. The authors report the development, implementation, and preliminary use of a new [...]

In public health and health services research, the inclusion of geographic information in data sets is critical. Because of concerns over the re-identification of patients, data from small geographic areas are either suppressed or the geographic areas are aggregated into larger ones. Our objective is to estimate the population size cut-off at which a geographic area is sufficiently large so that no data suppression or further aggregation is necessary.

The Program Requirements for Fellowship Education identify the knowledge and skills that physicians must master through the course of a training program to be certified in the subspecialty of clinical informatics. They also specify accreditation requirements for clinical informatics training programs. The AMIA Board of Directors approved this document in November 2008.

This study sought to develop and evaluate an approach for auditing the semantic completeness of the SNOMED CT contents using a formal concept analysis (FCA)-based model.

Interruptive alerts within electronic applications can cause "alert fatigue" if they fire too frequently or are clinically reasonable only some of the time. We assessed the impact of non-interruptive, real-time medication laboratory alerts on provider lab test ordering.

Health care providers are legally obliged to report cases of specified diseases to public health authorities, but existing manual, provider-initiated reporting systems generally result in incomplete, error-prone, and tardy information flow. Automated laboratory-based reports are more likely accurate and timely, but lack clinical information and treatment details. Here, we describe the Electronic Support for Public Health (ESP) application, a robust, automated, secure, portable public health detection and messaging system for [...]

Retention policies for clinical records are set primarily by the states, although the federal government mandates minimum maintenance periods for certain classes of patients and selected types of information. State policies vary considerably, but most jurisdictions permit many types of data to be destroyed after some period usually shorter than 10 years. Many health care organizations hold records longer than mandated, but over time much clinical data are discarded or [...]

This paper proposes, in words and pictures, a "fundamental theorem" to help clarify what informatics is and what it is not. In words, the theorem stipulates that a person working in partnership with an information resource is "better" than that same person unassisted. The theorem is applicable to health care, research, education, and administrative activities. Three corollaries to the theorem illustrate that informatics is more about people than technology; that [...]