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By the year 2008, a major reorganization of health care services in the United States will have evolved from the solo- and group-practice models of the 1940s, with fee-for-service and insurer-indemnification financing and paper-based information systems, to nationwide managed care plans employing enhanced computer-based information systems.

The LOINC (Logical Observation Identifier Names and Codes) vocabulary is a set of more than 10,000 names and codes developed for use as observation identifiers in standardized messages exchanged between clinical computer systems. The goal of the study was to create universal names and codes for clinical observations that could be used by all clinical information systems. The LOINC names are structured to facilitate rapid matching, either automated or manual [...]

If nurses, physicians, and health care planners knew more about patients' health-related preferences, care would most likely be cheaper, more effective, and closer to the individuals' desires. In order for patient preferences to be effectively used in the delivery of health care, it is important that patients be able to formulate and express preferences, that these judgments be made known to the clinician at the time of care, and that [...]

Clinical guidelines are heralded as a positive contribution to improving quality of care and ensuring the effectiveness of care. From the perspective of the health services researcher, the authors propose a model of how informatics can support the implementation of clinical guidelines and their integration into systems for decision support and clinical audit. Each element of the model is discussed in turn.

To investigate factors that determine the feasibility and effectiveness of a critiquing system for asthma/COPD that will be integrated with a general practitioner's (GP's) information system.

ACT/DB is a client-server database application for storing clinical trials and outcomes data, which is currently undergoing initial pilot use. It stores most of its data in entity-attribute-value form. Such data are segregated according to data type to allow indexing by value when possible, and binary large object data are managed in the same way as other data. ACT/DB lets an investigator design a study rapidly by defining the parameters [...]

The purpose of the study is to explore the use of formal systems to model nursing terminology.

A primary goal of the University of Pittsburgh's 1990-94 UMLS-sponsored effort was to develop and evaluate PostDoc (a lexical indexing system) and Pindex (a statistical indexing system) comparatively, and then in combination as a hybrid system. Each system takes as input a portion of the free text from a narrative part of a patient's electronic medical record and returns a list of suggested MeSH terms to use in formulating a [...]

The approach taken by the Unified Medical Language System (UMLS), in which disparate terminology systems are integrated, has allowed construction of an electronic thesaurus (the Metathesaurus) that avoids imposing any restrictions upon the content, structure, or semantics of the source terminologies. As such, the UMLS has served as a unifying paradigm by providing appropriate links among equivalent entities that are used in different contexts or for different purposes. It accordingly [...]