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Duplication of medical testing results in a financial burden to the healthcare system. Authors undertook a retrospective review of duplicate testing on patients receiving coordinated care across two institutions, each with its own electronic medical record system. In order to determine whether duplicate testing occurred and if such testing was clinically indicated, authors analyzed records of 85 patients transferred from one site to the other between January 1, 2006 and [...]

To identify factors in the nursing work domain that contribute to the problem of inpatient falls, aside from patient risk, using cognitive work analysis.

The logical observation identifiers names and codes (LOINC) database contains 55 000 terms consisting of more atomic components called parts. LOINC carries more than 18 000 distinct parts. It is necessary to have definitions/descriptions for each of these parts to assist users in mapping local laboratory codes to LOINC. It is believed that much of this information can be obtained from the internet; the first effort was with Wikipedia. This [...]

The authors report on the development of the Cancer Tissue Information Extraction System (caTIES)--an application that supports collaborative tissue banking and text mining by leveraging existing natural language processing methods and algorithms, grid communication and security frameworks, and query visualization methods. The system fills an important need for text-derived clinical data in translational research such as tissue-banking and clinical trials. The design of caTIES addresses three critical issues for informatics [...]

Personal health records (PHRs) are information repositories; however, PHRs may be less available to persons in the safety net setting. We deployed a free, secure, internet-based PHR for persons receiving care at the AIDS/HIV clinic at San Francisco General Hospital. In our initial rollout, 221 persons registered for the PHR. Compared to the entire clinic, these initial users were more likely to be Caucasian, male, non-Hispanic, on antiretroviral medications, and [...]

This pilot study explores the impact of a health topics overview (HTO) on reading comprehension. The HTO is generated automatically based on the presence of Unified Medical Language System terms. In a controlled setting, we presented health texts and posed 15 questions for each. We compared performance with and without the HTO. The answers were available in the text, but not always in the HTO. Our study (n=48) showed that [...]

Alerting providers to public health situations requires timeliness and context-relevance, both lacking in current systems. Incorporating decision support tools into electronic health records may provide a way to deploy public health alerts to clinicians at the point of care. A timely process for responding to Health Alert Network messages sent by the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene was developed by a network of community health centers [...]

To study the effects of using a population-based informatics system for osteoporosis screening and treatment in women aged 65 years or older.

Consumer research reveals considerable interest in the use of Personal Health Records (PHRs), yet adoption remains relatively low. Both adopters and nonadopters represent important perspectives from which to understand this paradox.