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The incidence of adverse drug reactions may be decreased by computerized physician order entry (CPOE) with decision support. The authors describe the development of a drug database model for computer-supported dose adjustment within a CPOE system. The following two core elements were included: (1) To allow electronic dose and volume calculation, the relation between strength (e.g., 5 mg/1 mL) and prescribed unit (e.g., 1 ampoule containing 2 mL) must be [...]

This report describes an innovative training program designed to foster entrepreneurship and professionalism in students interested in the field of medical informatics. The course was developed through a private-public interinstitutional collaboration involving four academic institutions, one private firm specializing in health care information management systems, and a philanthropic organization. The program challenged students to serve in multiple roles on multidisciplinary teams and develop an innovative hand-held solution for drug information [...]

To describe resources clinicians use when they prescribe antimicrobials, the authors surveyed prescribers by telephone within hours (median 2.9) after they ordered one or more antimicrobials for a patient. Among 157 prescribers, 87 (55%) used one or more external resources to aid in decisions about their order. The other 70 (45%) used only their own knowledge and experience. Fifty-nine (38%) consulted another person. Fifty-four (34%) used a print, computer, or [...]

Computerized physician documentation (CPD) has been implemented throughout the nation's Veterans Affairs Medical Centers (VAMCs) and is likely to increasingly replace handwritten documentation in other institutions. The use of this technology may affect educational and clinical activities, yet little has been reported in this regard. The authors conducted a qualitative study to determine the perceived impacts of CPD among faculty and housestaff in a VAMC.

The aim of this study was to investigate relations among different aspects in supervised word sense disambiguation (WSD; supervised machine learning for disambiguating the sense of a term in a context) and compare supervised WSD in the biomedical domain with that in the general English domain.

In 2002-2003, the American College of Medical Informatics (ACMI) undertook a study of the future of informatics training. This project capitalized on the rapidly expanding interest in the role of computation in basic biological research, well characterized in the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Biomedical Information Science and Technology Initiative (BISTI) report. The defining activity of the project was the three-day 2002 Annual Symposium of the College. A committee, comprised [...]

Most studies of the impact of information systems in organizations tend to see the implementation process as a "rollout" of technology, as a technical matter removed from organizational dynamics. There is substantial agreement that the success of implementing information systems is determined by organizational factors. However, it is less clear what these factors are. The authors propose to characterize the introduction of an information system as a process of mutual [...]

The effective coordination of health care relies on communication of confidential information about consumers between different health and community care services. However, consumers must be able to give or withhold "e-Consent" to those who wish to access their electronic health information. There are several possible forms for e-Consent. In the general consent model, a patient provides blanket consent for access to his or her information by an organization for all [...]