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Clinical prediction rules have been advocated as a possible mechanism to enhance clinical judgment in diagnostic, therapeutic, and prognostic assessment. Despite renewed interest in the their use, inconsistent terminology makes them difficult to index and retrieve by computerized search systems. No validated approaches to locating clinical prediction rules appear in the literature. The objective of this study was to derive and validate an optimal search filter for retrieving clinical prediction [...]

The Computerized Patient Record System is deployed at all 173 Veterans Affairs (VA) medical centers. Providers access clinical notes in the system from a note title menu. Following its implementation at the Nashville VA Medical Center, users expressed dissatisfaction with the time required find notes among hundreds of irregularly structured titles. The authors' objective was to develop a document-naming nomenclature (DNN) that creates informative, structured note titles that improve information [...]

To observe how electronic messaging between a hospital consultant and general practitioners (GPs) in 15 practices about patients suffering from diabetes evolved over a 3-year period after an initial 1-year study.

Direct physician order entry (POE) offers many potential benefits, but evidence suggests that POE requires substantially more time than traditional paper-based ordering methods. The Medical Gopher is a well-accepted system for direct POE that has been in use for more than 15 years. The authors hypothesized that physicians using the Gopher would not spend any more time writing orders than physicians using paper-based methods.

Decision support systems in the medical field have to be easily modified by medical experts themselves. The authors have designed a knowledge acquisition tool to facilitate the creation and maintenance of a knowledge base by the domain expert and its sharing and reuse by other institutions. The Unified Medical Language System (UMLS) contains the domain entities and constitutes the relations repository from which the expert builds, through a specific browser [...]

An evident contrast exists between the generally easy way medical doctors and administrators use the term "telemedicine" and the wide variety of significantly different technologic methods and devices necessary for correctly performing specific tasks in the field. Many misunderstandings could be avoided by agreeing on the types of services that telemedicine can provide, names for those services, and descriptions of what is included in the services. This manifesto lists representative [...]

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.

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 [...]