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Confusion about patients' medication regimens during the hospital admission and discharge process accounts for many preventable and serious medication errors. Many organizations have begun to redesign their clinical processes to address this patient safety concern. Partners HealthCare, an integrated delivery network in Boston, Massachusetts, has answered this interdisciplinary challenge by leveraging its multiple outpatient electronic medical records (EMR) and inpatient computerized provider order entry (CPOE) systems to facilitate the process [...]

The authors performed this study to determine the accuracy of several text classification methods to categorize wrist x-ray reports. We randomly sampled 751 textual wrist x-ray reports. Two expert reviewers rated the presence (n = 301) or absence (n = 450) of an acute fracture of wrist. We developed two information retrieval (IR) text classification methods and a machine learning method using a support vector machine (TC-1). In cross-validation on [...]

This case study examined the utility of regular expressions to identify clinical data relevant to the epidemiology of treatment of hypertension. We designed a software tool that employed regular expressions to identify and extract instances of documented blood pressure values and anti-hypertensive treatment intensification from the text of physician notes. We determined sensitivity, specificity and precision of identification of blood pressure values and anti-hypertensive treatment intensification using a gold standard [...]

Many Norwegian hospitals that are equipped with an electronic medical record (EMR) system now have proceeded to withdraw the paper-based medical record from clinical workflow. In two previous survey-based studies on the effect of removing the paper-based medical record on the work of physicians, nurses and medical secretaries, we concluded that to scan and eliminate the paper based record was feasible, but that the medical secretaries were the group that [...]

The VeriChip is a Radio-Frequency Identification (RFID) tag produced commercially for implantation in human beings. Its proposed uses include identification of medical patients, physical access control, contactless retail payment, and even the tracing of kidnapping victims. As the authors explain, the VeriChip is vulnerable to simple, over-the-air spoofing attacks. In particular, an attacker capable of scanning a VeriChip, eavesdropping on its signal, or simply learning its serial number can create [...]

To assess the acceptability and usage of a standalone personal digital assistant (PDA)-based clinical decision-support system (CDSS) for the diagnosis and management of acute respiratory tract infections (RTIs) in the outpatient setting.

To determine if clinician-selected electronic information resources improve primary care physicians' abilities to answer simulated clinical questions.

This review describes recent experimental and focus group research on graphics as a method of communication about quantitative health risks. Some of the studies discussed in this review assessed effect of graphs on quantitative reasoning, others assessed effects on behavior or behavioral intentions, and still others assessed viewers' likes and dislikes. Graphical features that improve the accuracy of quantitative reasoning appear to differ from the features most likely to alter [...]