Search AMIA.org

Despite an increasing movement toward shared decision making and the incorporation of patients' preferences into health care decision making, little research has been done on the development and evaluation of support systems that help clinicians elicit and integrate patients' preferences into patient care. This study evaluates nurses' use of CHOICE, a handheld-computer-based support system for preference-based care planning, which assists nurses in eliciting patients' preferences for functional performance at the [...]

The Patient-Centered Access to Secure Systems Online (PCASSO) project is designed to apply state-of-the-art-security to the communication of clinical information over the Internet.

Web-based applications have been developed that allow patients to enter their own information into secure personal health records. These applications are being promoted as a means of providing patients and providers with universal access to updated medical information. The authors evaluated the functionality and utility of a selection of personal health records.

The goal of this study was to complete a literature-based needs assessment with regard to common pediatric problems encountered by pediatric health care providers (PHCPs) and families, and to develop a problem-based pediatric digital library to meet those needs. The needs assessment yielded 65 information sources. Common problems were identified and categorized, and the Internet was manually searched for authoritative Web sites. The created pediatric digital library (www.generalpediatrics.com) used a [...]

In January 2000, the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) and the National Library of Medicine (NLM) cosponsored an invitational workshop entitled "Medical Informatics and Health Services Research: Bridging the Gap." Planned by a small committee of representatives from NLM and AHRQ institutional training centers, the workshop was designed to address the need for education of researchers interested in working at the intersection of the fields of medical informatics [...]

Stanford's two decades of success in linking medical informatics and health services research in both training and investigational activities reflects advantageous geography and history as well as natural synergies in the two areas. Health services research and medical informatics at Stanford have long shared a quantitative, analytic orientation, along with linked administration, curriculum, and clinical activities. Both the medical informatics and the health services research curricula draw on diverse course [...]

Reams of data pertaining directly to the core health services research mission are accumulating in large-scale organizational and clinical information systems. Health services researchers who grasp the structure of information systems and databases and the function of software applications can use existing data more effectively, assist in establishing new databases, and develop new tools to survey populations and collect data. At the same time, informaticians are needed who can structure [...]

To protect public health and national safety, AMIA recommends that the federal government dedicate technologic resources and medical informatics expertise to create a national health information infrastructure (NHII). An NHII provides the underlying information utility that connects local health providers and health officials through high-speed networks to national data systems necessary to detect and track global threats to public health. AMIA strongly recommends the accelerated development and wide-scale deployment of [...]