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Guidelines regarding patient-provider electronic mail are presented. The intent is to provide guidance concerning computer-based communications between clinicians and patients within a contractual relationship in which the health-care provider has taken on an explicit measure of responsibility for the client's care. The guidelines address two interrelated aspects: effective interaction between the clinician and patient, and observance of medicolegal prudence. Recommendations for site-specific policy formulation are included.

The aim of the project ARIANE is to model and implement seamless, natural, and easy-to-use interfaces with various kinds of heterogeneous biomedical information databases.

The National Library of Medicine's (NLM) Unified Medical Language System (UMLS) includes a Metathesaurus (Meta), which is a compilation of medical terms drawn from over 30 controlled vocabularies, and a Semantic Net, which contains the semantic types used to categorize Meta concepts and the semantic relations to connect them. Meta has been constructed through lexical matching techniques and human review. The purpose of this study was to audit the Meta [...]

In 1986, the National Library of Medicine (NLM) assembled a large multidisciplinary, multisite team to work on the Unified Medical Language System (UMLS), a collaborative research project aimed at reducing fundamental barriers to the application of computers to medicine. Beyond its tangible products, the UMLS Knowledge Sources, and its influence on the field of informatics, the UMLS project is an interesting case study in collaborative research and development. It illustrates [...]

Vancomycin-resistant enterococci represent an increasingly important cause of nosocomial infections. Minimizing vancomycin use represents a key strategy in preventing the spread of these infections.

Health care in the United States has become an information-intensive industry, yet electronic health records represent patient data inconsistently for lack of clinical data standards. Classifications that have achieved common acceptance, such as the ICD-9-CM or ICD, aggregate heterogeneous patients into broad categories, which preclude their practical use in decision support, development of refined guidelines, or detailed comparison of patient outcomes or benchmarks. This document proposes a framework for the [...]

Recent developments in medical informatics research have afforded possibilities for great advances in health care delivery. These exciting opportunities also present formidable challenges to the implementation and integration of technologies in the workplace. As in most domains, there is a gulf between technologic artifacts and end users. Since medical practice is a human endeavor, there is a need for bridging disciplines to enable clinicians to benefit from rapid technologic advances [...]

An evaluation of the cognitive processes used in the translation of a clinical guideline from text into an encoded form so that it can be shared among medical institutions.