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Efficient information management and communication within the emergency department (ED) is essential to providing timely and high-quality patient care. The ED whiteboard (census board) usually serves as an ED's central access point for operational and patient-related information. This article describes the design, functionality, and experiences with a computerized ED whiteboard, which has the ability to display relevant operational and patient-related information in real time. Embedded functionality, additional whiteboard views, and [...]

Complete patient health information that is available where and when it is needed is essential to providers and patients and improves healthcare quality and patient safety. VA and DoD have built on their previous experience in patient data exchange to establish data standards and terminology services to enable real-time bi-directional computable (i.e., encoded) data exchange and achieve semantic interoperability in compliance with recommended national standards and the eGov initiative. The [...]

Electronic mailing systems (e-mail) are an important means to disseminate information within electronic networks. However, in large business communities including the hectic environment of hospitals it may be difficult to induce account holders to read the e-mail. In two mailings disseminated in a large university hospital we evaluated the impact of e-mail layout (three e-mail text versions, two e-mails with graphics) on the willingness of its approximately 6500 recipients to [...]

Unstructured electronic information sources, such as news reports, are proving to be valuable inputs for public health surveillance. However, staying abreast of current disease outbreaks requires scouring a continually growing number of disparate news sources and alert services, resulting in information overload. Our objective is to address this challenge through the HealthMap.org Web application, an automated system for querying, filtering, integrating and visualizing unstructured reports on disease outbreaks.

We conducted a prospective observational study to (1) determine usage and construct validity of a method to gauge the cognitive impact of information derived from daily e-mail, and (2) describe self-reported impacts of research-based synopses (InfoPOEMs) delivered as e-mail. Ratings of InfoPOEMs using an Impact assessment scale provided (a) data on usage of the impact assessment method, (b) reports of impact by InfoPOEM and by doctor and (c) data for [...]

We examine the feasibility of a machine learning approach to identification of foot examination (FE) findings from the unstructured text of clinical reports. A Support Vector Machine (SVM) based system was constructed to process the text of physical examination sections of in- and out-patient clinical notes to identify if the findings of structural, neurological, and vascular components of a FE revealed normal or abnormal findings or were not assessed. The [...]

To assess compliance with a clinical decision support system (CDSS) for diagnostic management of children with fever without apparent source and to study the effects of application of the CDSS on time spent in the emergency department (ED) and number of laboratory tests.

The authors organized a Natural Language Processing (NLP) challenge on automatically determining the smoking status of patients from information found in their discharge records. This challenge was issued as a part of the i2b2 (Informatics for Integrating Biology to the Bedside) project, to survey, facilitate, and examine studies in medical language understanding for clinical narratives. This article describes the smoking challenge, details the data and the annotation process, explains the [...]

We describe the architecture of LifeCode (A-Life Medical, Inc.), a natural language processing system for free-text clinical information extraction, our methodology in applying LifeCode to the i2b2 smoking challenge, and statistical measures for performance evaluation. Due to the limited test size and the coefficient of variation in the test standard, it is difficult to draw conclusions regarding the relative efficacy of approaches that were applied to this challenge.

TimeText is a temporal reasoning system designed to represent, extract, and reason about temporal information in clinical text.