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While our Y2K worries about old computers "retiring" at midnight captured the television and news media attention, a more significant "old age" phenomenon snuck onto the scene with hardly a headline: the dawn of the age of the aged. (1) The over burdened health care system will face a worldwide wave of retirees who will live longer, cost more to treat, and demand new goods and services to help them [...]

To measure the uncertainty of temporal assertions like "3 weeks ago" in clinical texts.

As the professional home for biomedical and health informaticians, AMIA is actively working to support high quality relevant professional education and research opportunities. This issue of JAMIA presents two key documents that provide tangible evidence of progress on this front. In this editorial, we describe the context and specific purpose of the two documents, how they were developed, and AMIA's plans to build upon the documents.

To test whether the anchoring and order cognitive biases experienced during search by consumers using information retrieval systems can be corrected to improve the accuracy of, and confidence in, answers to health-related questions.

Interruptive alerts within electronic applications can cause "alert fatigue" if they fire too frequently or are clinically reasonable only some of the time. We assessed the impact of non-interruptive, real-time medication laboratory alerts on provider lab test ordering.

Surgical Process Models (SPMs) are models of surgical interventions. The objectives of this study are to validate acquisition methods for Surgical Process Models and to assess the performance of different observer populations.

Personal health records (PHR) are a modern health technology with the ability to engage patients more fully in their healthcare. Despite widespread interest, there has been little discussion around PHR governance at an organizational level. We develop a governance model and compare it to the practices of some of the early PHR adopters, including hospitals and ambulatory care settings, insurers and health plans, government departments, and commercial sectors. Decision-making structures [...]

Retention policies for clinical records are set primarily by the states, although the federal government mandates minimum maintenance periods for certain classes of patients and selected types of information. State policies vary considerably, but most jurisdictions permit many types of data to be destroyed after some period usually shorter than 10 years. Many health care organizations hold records longer than mandated, but over time much clinical data are discarded or [...]

Only half of consultants' medical recommendations are implemented. We created a tool that lets referring providers review and implement electronic recommendations made by consultants, with the hypothesis that facilitation with our tool could improve implementation.

The authors study two approaches to assertion classification. One of these approaches, Extended NegEx (ENegEx), extends the rule-based NegEx algorithm to cover alter-association assertions; the other, Statistical Assertion Classifier (StAC), presents a machine learning solution to assertion classification.