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This case study explored 1) how much online clinical data is required to obtain patient-specific recommendations from a computer-based clinical practice guideline, 2) whether the availability of increasing amounts of online clinical data might allow a higher specificity of those recommendations, and 3) whether that increased specificity is necessarily desirable. The "quick reference guide" version of the guideline for acute postoperative pain management in adults, developed by the Agency for [...]

Predict the behavior and estimate the telecommunication cost of a wide-area message store-and-forward network for health care providers that uses the telephone system.

A Usenet newsgroup, sci.med.informatics, has been created to serve as an international electronic forum for discussion of issues related to medical informatics. The creation process follows a set of administrative rules set out by the Usenet administration on the Internet and consists of five steps: 1) informal discussion, 2) request for formal discussion, 3) formal discussion, 4) voting, and 5) posting of results. The newsgroup can be accessed using any [...]

There is an urgent need to capture and record data related to clinical outcomes, but there are many barriers. The range of problems includes lack of agreement on conceptualization of the term "outcome," inadequate measures of outcomes, and inadequate information systems to capture and manipulate data that would reflect outcomes. This article focuses on information system requirements to capture, store, and utilize clinical outcome data. For greatest accuracy, outcome data [...]

Variations research is one important strategy in the quality management movement designed to improve the quality of health care and to control costs. Information systems are being utilized in variations research to provide an array of potential variables, to provide measures of the variability inherent in these variables, and to assist with the study of the linkages of patient and provider characteristics with interventions and outcomes. This article presents a [...]

The High-Performance Computing and Communications (HPCC) program is a multiagency federal effort to advance the state of computing and communications and to provide the technologic platform on which the National Information Infrastructure (NII) can be built. The HPCC program supports the development of high-speed computers, high-speed telecommunications, related software and algorithms, education and training, and information infrastructure technology and applications. The vision of the NII is to extend access to [...]