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Integrating data that reside in different systems remains an often laborious process, requiring either manual steps or complicated programming. This paper describes a method for state-mandated reporting of childhood blood lead testing results that makes use of object linking and embedding technology and readily available software products to pull together information from different legacy systems. A terminal session emulator employs object linking and embedding automation to extract host data, and [...]

The "vocabulary problem" has long plagued the developers, implementers, and users of computer-based systems. The authors review selected activities of the Health Level 7 (HL7) Vocabulary Technical Committee that are related to vocabulary domain specification for HL7 coded data elements. These activities include: 1) the development of two sets of principles to provide guidance to terminology stakeholders, including organizations seeking to deploy HL7-compliant systems, terminology developers, and terminology integrators; 2) [...]

The authors have developed a Web-based system that provides summary information about clinical trials being conducted throughout the United States. The first version of the system, publicly available in February 2000, contains more than 4,000 records representing primarily trials sponsored by the National Institutes of Health. The impetus for this system has come from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) Modernization Act of 1997, which mandated a registry of both [...]

While largely ignored in informatics thinking, the clinical communication space accounts for the major part of the information flow in health care. Growing evidence indicates that errors in communication give rise to substantial clinical morbidity and mortality. This paper explores the implications of acknowledging the primacy of the communication space in informatics and explores some solutions to communication difficulties. It also examines whether understanding the dynamics of communication between human [...]

While the use of multimedia methods in medical education and decision support can facilitate learning, it also has certain hazards. One potential hazard is the inadvertent triggering of racial and gender bias by the appearance of actors or patients in presentations. The authors hypothesized that race and gender affect preferences. To explore this issue they studied the effects of actors' race and gender on preference ratings for health states that [...]

Citation of scientific materials published on the Internet is often cumbersome because of unwieldy uniform resource locators (URLs). The authors describe a format for URLs that simplifies citation of scholarly materials. Its use depends on a simple HTML device, the "refresh page." Uniform citation would follow this format: [Author I. Title of article. http:// domain/year/month-day(e#).html]. The HTML code for such a page is: (HTML) (head) (meta HTTP-EQUIV="Refresh" CONTENT="0; URL= http://Actual-URL/ [...]

The authors have shown that clinical guidelines embedded in an electronic medical record improved the quality, while lowering the cost, of care for health care workers who incurred occupational exposures to body fluid. They seek to determine whether this system has similar effects on the emergency department care of young children with febrile illness.

Most health care databases include time-stamped instant data as the only temporal representation of patient information. Many previous efforts have attempted to provide frameworks in which medical databases could be queried in relation to time. These, however, have required either a sophisticated database representation of time, including time intervals, or a time-stamp-based database coupled with a nonstandard temporal query language. In this work, the authors demonstrate how their previously described [...]