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Laboratory results provide necessary information for the management of ambulatory patients. To realize the benefits of an electronic health record (EHR) and coded laboratory data (e.g., decision support and improved data access and display), results from laboratories that are external to the health care enterprise need to be integrated with internal results. We describe the development and clinical impact of integrating external results into the EHR at Intermountain Health Care [...]

Although the patient Internet portal is a potentially transformative technology, there is little scientific information about the demographic and clinical characteristics of portal enrollees and the features that they access.

Clinical Document Architecture, Release One (CDA R1), became an American National Standards Institute (ANSI)-approved HL7 Standard in November 2000, representing the first specification derived from the Health Level 7 (HL7) Reference Information Model (RIM). CDA, Release Two (CDA R2), became an ANSI-approved HL7 Standard in May 2005 and is the subject of this article, where the focus is primarily on how the standard has evolved since CDA R1, particularly in [...]

Telemedicine is a promising but largely unproven technology for providing case management services to patients with chronic conditions who experience barriers to access to care or a high burden of illness.

An important part of public health is identifying patterns of poor health and deprivation. Specific patterns of poor health may be associated with features of the geographic environment where contamination or pollution may be occurring. For example, there may be clusters of poor health surrounding nuclear power stations, whereas major roads or rivers may be associated with areas of poor health alongside the feature in chains. Current methods are limited [...]

General practice research databases are increasingly used to study intended and unintended effects of treatments. However, confounding by indication remains a major problem. The randomized database study methodology has been proposed as a method to combine the strengths of observational database (generalizability) and the strength of the randomized clinical trial (RCT) design (randomization). We developed an infrastructure that enables the execution of randomized database studies with treatment randomization facilitated by [...]

As we move toward an era when health information is more readily accessible and transferable, there are several issues that will arise. This article addresses the challenges of information filtering, context-sensitive decision support, legal and ethical guidelines regarding obligations to obtain and use the information, aligning patient and health professionals' expectations in regard to the use and usefulness of the information, and enhancing data reliability. The authors discuss the issues [...]

To help biomedical researchers recognize dynamically introduced abbreviations in biomedical literature, such as gene and protein names, we have constructed a support system called ALICE (Abbreviation LIfter using Corpus-based Extraction). ALICE aims to extract all types of abbreviations with their expansions from a target paper on the fly.

Charting systems with decision support have been developed to assist with medication charting, but many of the features of these programs are not properly used in their clinical application. An analysis of medication error reports at LDS Hospital revealed the occurrence of errors that should have been detected and prevented by decision support features if real-time entry at the bedside had taken place. The aim of this study was to [...]