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Knowledge representation involves enumeration of conceptual symbols and arrangement of these symbols into some meaningful structure. Medical knowledge representation has traditionally focused more on the structure than the symbols. Several significant efforts are under way, at local, national, and international levels, to address the representation of the symbols though the creation of high-quality terminologies that are themselves knowledge based. This paper reviews these efforts, including the Medical Entities Dictionary (MED) [...]

GeneClinics is an online genetic information resource consisting of descriptions of specific inherited disorders ("disease profiles") as well as information on the role of genetic testing in the diagnosis, management, and genetic counseling of patients with these inherited conditions. GeneClinics is intended to promote the use of genetic services in medical care and personal decision making by providing health care practitioners and patients with information on genetic testing for specific [...]

The Internet represents a different type of technology for publishers of scientific, technical, and medical journals. It is not a technology that sustains current markets and creates new efficiencies but is, rather, a disruptive technology that could radically alter market forces, profit expectations, and business models. This paper is a translation and amplification of the research done in this area, applied to a large-circulation new science journal, Pediatrics. The findings [...]

Information economics offers insights into the dynamics of information across networked systems like the Internet. An information marketplace is different from other marketplaces because an information good is not actually consumed and can be reproduced and distributed at almost no cost. For information producers to remain profitable, they will need to minimize their exposure to competition. For example, information can be sold by charging site access rather than information access [...]

Despite the general adoption of graphical users interfaces (GUIs) in health care, few empirical data document the impact of this move on system users. This study compares two distinctly different user interfaces, a legacy text-based interface and a prototype graphical interface, for differences in nurses' response time (RT), errors, and satisfaction when the interfaces are used in the performance of computerized nursing order tasks. In a medical center on the [...]

The vision of integrating information-from a variety of sources, into the way people work, to improve decisions and process-is one of the cornerstones of biomedical informatics. Thoughts on how this vision might be realized have evolved as improvements in information and communication technologies, together with discoveries in biomedical informatics, and have changed the art of the possible. This review identified three distinct generations of "integration" projects. First-generation projects create a [...]

As increasingly powerful informatics systems are designed, developed, and implemented, they inevitably affect larger, more heterogeneous groups of people and more organizational areas. In turn, the major challenges to system success are often more behavioral than technical. Successfully introducing such systems into complex health care organizations requires an effective blend of good technical and good organizational skills. People who have low psychological ownership in a system and who vigorously resist [...]

To determine whether there are statistically significant differences in the content of electronic mail (e-mail) and conventional mail sent to authors of papers published in medical journals.