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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 task of creating and maintaining a front end to a large institutional entity-attribute-value (EAV) database can be cumbersome when using traditional client-server technology. Switching to Web technology as a delivery vehicle solves some of these problems but introduces others. In particular, Web development environments tend to be primitive, and many features that client-server developers take for granted are missing. WebEAV is a generic framework for Web development that is [...]

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 discuss the usability of an automated tool that supports entry, by clinical experts, of the knowledge necessary for forming high-level concepts and patterns from raw time-oriented clinical data.

Many adults with cancer are not enrolled in clinical trials because caregivers do not have the time to match the patient's clinical findings with varying eligibility criteria associated with multiple trials for which the patient might be eligible. The authors developed a point-of-use portable decision support tool (DS-TRIEL) to automate this matching process. The support tool consists of a hand-held computer with a programmable relational database. A two-level hierarchic decision [...]

The University of Utah has been educating health professionals in medical informatics since 1964. Over the 35 years since the program's inception, 272 graduate students have studied in the department. Most students have been male (80 percent) and have come from the United States (75 percent). Students entering the program have had diverse educational backgrounds, most commonly in medicine, engineering, computer science, or biology (59 percent of all informatics students) [...]

This study examines how characteristics of clinical cases and physician users relate to the users' perceptions of the usefulness of the Quick Medical Reference (QMR) and their confidence in their diagnoses when supported by the decision support system.

The authors describe a methodology for helping computational biologists diagnose discrepancies they encounter between experimental data and the predictions of scientific models. The authors call these discrepancies data-model conflicts. They have built a prototype system to help scientists resolve these conflicts in a more systematic, evidence-based manner. In computational biology, data-model conflicts are the result of complex computations in which data and models are transformed and evaluated. Increasingly, the data [...]

The purpose of this article is to provide the author's perspective on whether it is likely or feasible that those working in the health care domain will adapt and use lessons learned by those in the industrial domain. This article provides some historical perspective on the changes brought about in the industrial domain through the introduction of new technologies, including information technologies. The author discusses how industrialization catalyzed changes in [...]