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To improve and simplify electronic order entry in an existing electronic patient record, the authors developed an alternative system for entering orders, which is based on a command- interface using robust and simple natural-language techniques.

Designing a Web system for elderly patients requires attention to the users' functional impairments and inexperience with computers. The authors reviewed published guides for the design of Web-based clinical systems for elderly patients and identified additional design considerations that have not been reported in the literature. The resulting recommendations are related to the system interface, the training and support of users, and the content of Web pages. The recommendations can [...]

The Human Brain Project consortium continues to struggle with effective sharing of tools. To facilitate reuse of its tools, the Stanford Psychiatry Neuroimaging Laboratory (SPNL) has developed BrainImageJ, a new software framework in Java. The framework consists of two components-a set of four programming interfaces and an application front end. The four interfaces define extension pathways for new data models, file loaders and savers, algorithms, and visualization tools. Any Java [...]

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 [...]

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.

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 [...]

As a multidisciplinary field, medical informatics draws on a range of disciplines, such as computer science, information science, and the social and cognitive sciences. The cognitive sciences can provide important insights into the nature of the processes involved in human- computer interaction and help improve the design of medical information systems by providing insight into the roles that knowledge, memory, and strategies play in a variety of cognitive activities. In [...]

The track entitled "Consumer Informatics Supporting Patients as Co-Producers of Quality" at the AMIA Spring 2000 Congress was devoted to examining the new field of consumer health informatics. This area is developing rapidly, as worldwide changes are occurring in the organization and delivery of health care and in the traditional roles of patient and provider. This paper describes the key themes of the track; implications of the growing area of [...]