Search AMIA.org

To reduce the risk of wrong-patient errors, safety experts recommend limiting the number of patient records providers can open at once in electronic health records (EHRs). However, it is unknown whether health care organizations follow this recommendation or what rationales drive their decisions. To address this gap, we conducted an electronic survey via 2 national listservs. Among 167 inpatient and outpatient study facilities using EHR systems designed to open multiple [...]

Given the complexity of high-acuity health care, designing an effective clinical note template can be beneficial to both document patient care and clarify how telemedicine is used. We characterized documented interactions via a standardized note template between bedside intensive care unit (ICU) providers and teleintensivists in 2 Veterans Health Administration ICU telemedicine support centers. All ICUs linked to support centers and providing care from October 2012 through September 2014 were [...]

Faced with national requirements to promote antimicrobial stewardship and reduce drug-resistant infections, community hospitals are challenged to make the best use of existing resources. Eighteen months after building antibiotic decision support into our electronic order platform, high-risk antibiotic use decreased by 83% (P < .001) at our community hospital. Hospital-acquired Clostridium difficile infections declined 24% (P = .07).

In this report, we describe 2 instances in which expert use of an electronic health record (EHR) system interfaced to an external clinical laboratory information system led to unintended consequences wherein 2 patients failed to have laboratory tests drawn in a timely manner. In both events, user actions combined with the lack of an acknowledgment message describing the order cancellation from the external clinical system were the root causes. In [...]

We sought to understand how patients and primary care teams use secure messaging (SM) to communicate with one another by analyzing secure message threads from 2 Department of Veterans Affairs facilities.

Identify and describe information needs and associated goals of physicians, care coordinators, and families related to coordinating care for medically complex children and youth with special health care needs (CYSHCN).

Patient portals have shown potential for increasing health care quality and efficiency. Internet access and other factors influencing patient portal use could worsen health disparities.

As the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) receives over a million adverse event reports associated with medication use every year, a system is needed to aid FDA safety evaluators in identifying reports most likely to demonstrate causal relationships to the suspect medications. We combined text mining with machine learning to construct and evaluate such a system to identify medication-related adverse event reports.

The aim of the study was to comprehensively explore the genetic susceptibility correlations among diseases and traits from large-scale individual genotype data.

Pragmatic clinical trials (PCTs) are research investigations embedded in health care settings designed to increase the efficiency of research and its relevance to clinical practice. The Health Care Systems Research Collaboratory, initiated by the National Institutes of Health Common Fund in 2010, is a pioneering cooperative aimed at identifying and overcoming operational challenges to pragmatic research. Drawing from our experience, we present 4 broad categories of informatics-related challenges: (1) using [...]