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To compare out-of-box performance of three commercially available continuous speech recognition software packages: IBM ViaVoice 98 with General Medicine Vocabulary; Dragon Systems NaturallySpeaking Medical Suite, version 3.0; and L&H Voice Xpress for Medicine, General Medicine Edition, version 1.2.

Recent research has studied the communication behaviors of clinical hospital workers and observed a tendency for these workers to use communication behaviors that were often inefficient. Workers were observed to favor synchronous forms of communication, such as telephone calls and chance face-to-face meetings with colleagues, even when these channels were not effective. Synchronous communication also contributes to a highly interruptive working environment, increasing the potential for clinical errors to be [...]

Linking the electronic health record to the digital library is a Web-era reformulation of the long-standing informatics goal of seamless integration of automated clinical data and relevant knowledge-based information to support informed decisions. The spread of the Internet, the development of the World Wide Web, and converging format standards for electronic health data and digital publications make effective linking increasingly feasible. Some existing systems link electronic health data and knowledge-based [...]

For the past decade, Stanford Medical Informatics has combined clinical informatics and bioinformatics research and training in an explicit way. The interest in applying informatics techniques to both clinical problems and problems in basic science can be traced to the Dendral project in the 1960s. Having bioinformatics and clinical informatics in the same academic unit is still somewhat unusual and can lead to clashes of clinical and basic science cultures [...]

This paper provides a "viewpoint discussion" based on a presentation made to the 2000 Symposium of the American College of Medical Informatics. It discusses potential opportunities for researchers in health informatics to become involved in the rapidly growing field of bioinformatics, using the activities of the Yale Center for Medical Informatics as a case study. One set of opportunities occurs where bioinformatics research itself intersects with the clinical world. Examples [...]

Entity-attribute-value (EAV) representation is a means of organizing highly heterogeneous data using a relatively simple physical database schema. EAV representation is widely used in the medical domain, most notably in the storage of data related to clinical patient records. Its potential strengths suggest its use in other biomedical areas, in particular research databases whose schemas are complex as well as constantly changing to reflect evolving knowledge in rapidly advancing scientific [...]

Many adults with cancer are not enrolled in clinical trials because caregivers do not have the time to match the patient's clinical findings with varying eligibility criteria associated with multiple trials for which the patient might be eligible. The authors developed a point-of-use portable decision support tool (DS-TRIEL) to automate this matching process. The support tool consists of a hand-held computer with a programmable relational database. A two-level hierarchic decision [...]

The University of Utah has been educating health professionals in medical informatics since 1964. Over the 35 years since the program's inception, 272 graduate students have studied in the department. Most students have been male (80 percent) and have come from the United States (75 percent). Students entering the program have had diverse educational backgrounds, most commonly in medicine, engineering, computer science, or biology (59 percent of all informatics students) [...]

Richard T. West, IAIMS (Integrated Advanced Information Management Systems) Program Officer at the National Library of Medicine for 13 years, reflects on the origin, development, effectiveness, and future of IAIMS efforts. He dwells on the changes that have taken place as the concept of IAIMS has evolved from a technology-based to an organization-based level of integration. The role of IAIMS in patient care, education, and research is discussed, along with [...]