Search AMIA.org

The American health care system is one of the world's largest and most complex industries. The Health Care Financing Administration reports that 1997 expenditures for health care exceeded one trillion dollars, or 13.5 percent of the gross domestic product. Despite these expenditures, over 16 percent of the U.S. population remains uninsured, and a large percentage of patients express dissatisfaction with the health care system. Managed care, effective in its ability [...]

To determine the consistency among the practice guidelines of the Dutch College of General Practitioners with respect to the use of blood tests.

While preference elicitation techniques have been effective in helping patients make decisions consistent with their preferences, little is known about whether information about patient preferences affects clinicians in clinical decision making and improves patient outcomes. The purpose of this study was to evaluate a decision support system for eliciting elderly patients' preferences for self-care capability and providing this information to nurses in clinical practice-specifically, its effect on nurses' care priorities [...]

Many hospitals are investing in computer-based provider order-entry (POE) systems, and providers' evaluations have proved important for the success of the systems. The authors assessed how physicians and nurses viewed the effects of one modified commercial POE system on time spent patients, resource utilization, errors with orders, and overall quality of care.

Clinical laboratories and clinicians transmit certain laboratory test results to public health agencies as required by state or local law. Most of these surveillance data are currently received by conventional mail or facsimile transmission. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Council of State and Territorial Epidemiologists, and Association of Public Health Laboratories are preparing to implement surveillance systems that will use existing laboratory information systems to transmit electronic [...]

The authors surveyed existing standard codes for units of measures, such as ISO 2955, ANSI X3.50, and Health Level 7's ISO+. Because these standards specify only the character representation of units, the authors developed a semantic model for units based on dimensional analysis. Through this model, conversion between units and calculations with dimensioned quantities become as simple as calculating with numbers. All atomic symbols for prefixes and units are defined [...]

To evaluate the influence of computer-based reminders about influenza vaccination on the behavior of individual clinicians at each clinical opportunity.

To design a document model that provides reliable and efficient access to clinical information in patient reports for a broad range of clinical applications, and to implement an automated method using natural language processing that maps textual reports to a form consistent with the model.