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Biomedical publishing stands at a crossroads. The traditional print, peer-reviewed, subscription journal has served science well but is now being called into question. Because of spiraling print journal costs and the worldwide acceptance of the Internet as a valid publication medium, there is a compelling opportunity to re-examine our current paradigm and future options. This report illustrates the conflicts and restrictions inherent in the current publishing model and examines how [...]

The authors' goal was to determine whether dynamic categorization, a new technique for organizing search results, is more useful than the two existing organizational techniques: relevance ranking and clustering. They define a useful tool as one that helps users learn about the kinds of information that pertain to their query, find answers to their questions efficiently and easily, and feel satisfied with their search experience.

To create "extensional definitions" of laboratory codes from derived characteristics of coded values in a clinical database and then use these definitions in the automated mapping of codes between disparate facilities.

The development of integrated health care systems, the building of distributed computer networks throughout them, and the advent of easy-to-use electronic medical records for ambulatory practices combine to create a powerful argument for an enterprise electronic medical record. Potential customers need to learn from both successes and failures. Although the author could find in the literature only two reports of failures, a survey of family practice residencies revealed ten programs [...]

Terminology work in nursing has given rise to an increasing number of nursing terminologies. These generally take the form of controlled vocabularies. Because of the limitations of the controlled vocabulary approach, individual terminologies tend to be tuned to meet the specific needs of their intended users. Differences between terminologies are now a significant barrier to the comparison and interchange of health information. To agree on a single, multipurpose terminology would [...]

The authors study the extraction of useful phrases from a natural language database by statistical methods. The aim is to leverage human effort by providing preprocessed phrase lists with a high percentage of useful material.

To identify variables that may enhance medical student's preparedness for computer-based administration of the United States Medical Licensing Examination (USMLE).

Linking the electronic health record to the digital library is a Web-era reformulation of the long-standing informatics goal of seamless integration of automated clinical data and relevant knowledge-based information to support informed decisions. The spread of the Internet, the development of the World Wide Web, and converging format standards for electronic health data and digital publications make effective linking increasingly feasible. Some existing systems link electronic health data and knowledge-based [...]

This paper provides a "viewpoint discussion" based on a presentation made to the 2000 Symposium of the American College of Medical Informatics. It discusses potential opportunities for researchers in health informatics to become involved in the rapidly growing field of bioinformatics, using the activities of the Yale Center for Medical Informatics as a case study. One set of opportunities occurs where bioinformatics research itself intersects with the clinical world. Examples [...]

To measure the strength of agreement between the concepts and records retrieved from a computerized patient database, in response to physician-derived questions, using a semantic terminological model for clinical findings with those concepts and records excerpted clinically by manual identification. The performance of the semantic terminological model is also compared with the more established retrieval methods of free-text search, ICD-10, and hierarchic retrieval.