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Standardized data regarding the distribution, quality, reach, and variation in public health services provided at the community level and in wide use across states and communities do not exist. This leaves a major gap in our nation's understanding of the value of prevention activities and, in particular, the contributions of our government public health agencies charged with assuring community health promotion and protection. Public health and community leaders, therefore, are [...]

During a Phase 2 rectal microbicide trial, men who have sex with men and transgender women (n = 187) in 4 countries (Peru, South Africa, Thailand, United States) reported product use daily via short message service (SMS). To prevent disclosure of study participation, the SMS system program included privacy and security features. We evaluated participants' perceptions of privacy while using the system and acceptability of privacy/security features.

Patient-provider electronic communication has proliferated in recent years, yet there is a dearth of published research either leading to, or including, recommendations that improve clinical care and prevent unintended negative consequences. We critically appraise published guidelines and suggest an agenda for future work in this area.

Finding relevant datasets is important for promoting data reuse in the biomedical domain, but it is challenging given the volume and complexity of biomedical data. Here we describe the development of an open source biomedical data discovery system called DataMed, with the goal of promoting the building of additional data indexes in the biomedical domain.

This study proposes a novel Prior knowledge guided Integrated likelihood Estimation (PIE) method to correct bias in estimations of associations due to misclassification of electronic health record (EHR)-derived binary phenotypes, and evaluates the performance of the proposed method by comparing it to 2 methods in common practice.

Electronic health record phenotyping is the use of raw electronic health record data to assert characterizations about patients. Researchers have been doing it since the beginning of biomedical informatics, under different names. Phenotyping will benefit from an increasing focus on fidelity, both in the sense of increasing richness, such as measured levels, degree or severity, timing, probability, or conceptual relationships, and in the sense of reducing bias. Research agendas should [...]

The College of American Pathologists (CAP) introduced the first cancer synoptic reporting protocols in 1998. However, the objective of a fully computable and machine-readable cancer synoptic report remains elusive due to insufficient definitional content in Systematized Nomenclature of Medicine - Clinical Terms (SNOMED CT) and Logical Observation Identifiers Names and Codes (LOINC). To address this terminology gap, investigators at the University of Nebraska Medical Center (UNMC) are developing, authoring, and [...]

To present user needs and usability evaluations of DataMed, a Data Discovery Index (DDI) that allows searching for biomedical data from multiple sources.

Existing general clinical natural language processing (NLP) systems such as MetaMap and Clinical Text Analysis and Knowledge Extraction System have been successfully applied to information extraction from clinical text. However, end users often have to customize existing systems for their individual tasks, which can require substantial NLP skills. Here we present CLAMP (Clinical Language Annotation, Modeling, and Processing), a newly developed clinical NLP toolkit that provides not only state-of-the-art NLP [...]