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There is a persistent view of a significant minority in the medical informatics community that the randomized controlled trial (RCT) has a limited role to play in evaluating clinical information systems. A common reason voiced by skeptics is that these systems are fundamentally different from drug interventions, so the RCT is irrelevant. There is an urgent need to promote the use of RCTs, given the shift to evidence-based policy and [...]

A 2005 report from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services and the Centers for Disease Control Surgical Infection Prevention program indicated that only 41% of prophylactic antibacterials were correctly stopped within 24 h of the end of surgery. Electronic order sets have shown promise as a means of integrating guideline information with electronic order entry systems and facilitating safer, more effective care.

Clinical decision support (CDS) is a powerful tool for improving healthcare quality and ensuring patient safety; however, effective implementation of CDS requires effective clinical and technical governance structures. The authors sought to determine the range and variety of these governance structures and identify a set of recommended practices through observational study.

Clinical documentation is central to patient care. The success of electronic health record system adoption may depend on how well such systems support clinical documentation. A major goal of integrating clinical documentation into electronic heath record systems is to generate reusable data. As a result, there has been an emphasis on deploying computer-based documentation systems that prioritize direct structured documentation. Research has demonstrated that healthcare providers value different factors when [...]

Informatics applications have the potential to improve participation in clinical trials, but their design must be based on user-centered research. This research used a fully counterbalanced experimental design to investigate the effect of changes made to the original version of a website, http://BreastCancerTrials.org/, and confirm that the revised version addressed and reinforced patients' needs and expectations.

Pharmacy clinical decision-support (CDS) software that contains drug-drug interaction (DDI) information may augment pharmacists' ability to detect clinically significant interactions. However, studies indicate these systems may miss some important interactions. The purpose of this study was to assess the performance of pharmacy CDS programs to detect clinically important DDIs.

Meaningful use of electronic health records (EHRs) is dependent on accurate clinical documentation. Documenting common goals in the intensive care unit (ICU), such as sedation and ventilator management plans, may increase collaboration and decrease patient length of stay. This study analyzed the degree to which goals stated were present in the EHR.

Arizona Medicaid developed a Health Information Exchange (HIE) system called the Arizona Medical Information Exchange (AMIE).

Predicting patient outcomes from genome-wide measurements holds significant promise for improving clinical care. The large number of measurements (eg, single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs)), however, makes this task computationally challenging. This paper evaluates the performance of an algorithm that predicts patient outcomes from genome-wide data by efficiently model averaging over an exponential number of naive Bayes (NB) models.

A review of 2010 research in translational bioinformatics provides much to marvel at. We have seen notable advances in personal genomics, pharmacogenetics, and sequencing. At the same time, the infrastructure for the field has burgeoned. While acknowledging that, according to researchers, the members of this field tend to be overly optimistic, the authors predict a bright future.