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To develop a theoretically informed and empirically validated survey instrument for assessing prescribers' perception of computerized drug-drug interaction (DDI) alerts.

Case report forms (CRFs) are used for structured-data collection in clinical research studies. Existing CRF-related standards encompass structural features of forms and data items, content standards, and specifications for using terminologies. This paper reviews existing standards and discusses their current limitations. Because clinical research is highly protocol-specific, forms-development processes are more easily standardized than is CRF content. Tools that support retrieval and reuse of existing items will enable standards adoption [...]

Many healthcare organizations (HCOs) including Kaiser Permanente, Johns Hopkins, Cleveland Medical Center, and MD Anderson Cancer Center, provide access to online health communities as part of their overall patient support services. The key objective in establishing and running these online health communities is to offer empathic support to patients. Patients' perceived empathy is considered to be critical in patient recovery, specifically, by enhancing patient's compliance with treatment protocols and the [...]

Clinical guideline adherence for diagnostic imaging (DI) and acceptance of electronic decision support in a rural community family practice clinic was assessed over 36 weeks. Physicians wrote 904 DI orders, 58% of which were addressed by the Canadian Association of Radiologists guidelines.

Public health surveillance requires outbreak detection algorithms with computational efficiency sufficient to handle the increasing volume of disease surveillance data. In response to this need, the authors propose a spatial clustering algorithm, rank-based spatial clustering (RSC), that detects rapidly infectious but non-contagious disease outbreaks.

We evaluated the effects of integrating order subsets for the most common medical diagnoses into a general medical admission order set of our electronic medical records (EMR) in order to improve order set integration by clinicians.

Informatics for Integrating Biology and the Bedside (i2b2) is an initiative funded by the NIH that aims at building an informatics infrastructure to support biomedical research. The University of Pavia has recently integrated i2b2 infrastructure with a registry of inherited arrhythmogenic diseases. Within this project, the authors created a novel i2b2 cell, named R Engine Cell, which allows the communication between i2b2 and the R statistical software. As survival analyses [...]

The authors investigated use of the internet-based patient portal, kp.org, among a well-characterized population of adults with diabetes in Northern California. Among 14,102 diverse patients, 5671 (40%) requested a password for the patient portal. Of these, 4311 (76%) activated their accounts, and 3922 (69%), logged on to the patient portal one or more times; 2990 (53%) participants viewed laboratory results, 2132 (38%) requested medication refills, 2093 (37%) sent email messages [...]

Serious medication errors occur commonly in the period after hospital discharge. Medication reconciliation in the postdischarge ambulatory setting may be one way to reduce the frequency of these errors. The authors describe the design and implementation of a novel tool built into an ambulatory electronic medical record (EMR) to facilitate postdischarge medication reconciliation. The tool compares the preadmission medication list within the ambulatory EMR to the hospital discharge medication list [...]