Search AMIA.org

Telemedicine is being used by physicians at the member hospitals of the Jefferson Cancer Network (JCN) for consultations regarding the diagnosis and management of cancer patients. The technology employed for this telemedicine system was chosen to meet three related specifications: low capital and operating cost, internal maintainability by community hospital data processing staffs, and compatibility with the existing technologic infrastructure. The solution selected is the ubiquitous desktop personal computer and [...]

The Interactive Home Health Care Program is a demonstration project evaluating the use of in-home telemedicine to provide health care for elderly and disabled people. Local cable systems interconnect a base station staffed by a telemedicine nurse with a modified television in the home. Six months into the project, 38 patients are being cared for at three sites in rural Kansas. Individual patient profiles show improvement. Technical and social challenges [...]

The growing public interest in health and wellness information stems from many sources, including social changes related to consumers' rights and women's health movements, and economic changes brought about by the managed health care revolution. Public, hospital, and medical center libraries have been ill-equipped to meet the increasing need for consumer-oriented materials, even though a few notable programs have been established. The "Information Superhighway" could be an effective tool for [...]

The World Wide Web is a powerful new way to deliver on-line clinical information, but several problems limit its value to health care professionals: content is highly distributed and difficult to find, clinical information is not separated from non-clinical information, and the current Web technology is unable to support some advanced retrieval capabilities. A system called CliniWeb has been developed to address these problems. CliniWeb is an index to clinical [...]

The literature on the performance evaluation of medical expert system is extensive, yet most of the techniques used in the early stages of system development are inappropriate for deployed expert systems. Because extensive clinical and informatics expertise and resources are required to perform evaluations, efficient yet effective methods of monitoring performance during the long-term maintenance phase of the expert system life cycle must be devised. Statistical process control techniques provide [...]

Patient conditions and events are the core of patient record content. Computer-based records will require standard vocabularies to represent these data consistently, thereby facilitating clinical decision support, research, and efficient care delivery. To address whether existing major coding systems can serve this function, the authors evaluated major clinical classifications for their content coverage.

To examine the relationships among different performance scores for each of four diagnostic decision support systems (DDSSs).

To investigate a new approach for query expansion based on retrieval feedback. The first objective in this study was to examine alternative query-expansion methods within the same retrieval-feedback framework. The three alternatives proposed are: expansion on the MeSH query field alone, expansion on the free-text field alone, and expansion on both the MeSH and the free-text fields. The second objective was to gain further understanding of retrieval feedback by examining [...]