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The English version of the online encyclopedia, Wikipedia, has been recently reported to be the prominent source of online health information. However, there is little information concerning the quality of information found in Wikipedia. Therefore, we created a questionnaire asking for scope, completeness, and accuracy of information found on osteosarcoma. Three independent observers tested the English version of Wikipedia, as well as the patient version and the health professional version [...]

The authors developed a computerized algorithm that estimates 'who transmits to whom'--that is, the likeliest transmission paths during an outbreak of person-to-person transmitted illness. This algorithm uses basic information about natural history of the disease, population structure, and chronology of observed symptoms. To assess the algorithm efficacy, the authors built a simulator with parameters describing the disease and the population to simulate random outbreaks of influenza. The algorithm's performance was [...]

Family history information has emerged as an increasingly important tool for clinical care and research. While recent standards provide for structured entry of family history, many clinicians record family history data in text. The authors sought to characterize family history information within clinical documents to assess the adequacy of existing models and create a more comprehensive model for its representation. Models were evaluated on 100 documents containing 238 sentences and [...]

Lack of dose adjustment for renally cleared drugs in the presence of poor renal function is a common problem in the hospital setting. The absence of a clinical decision support system (CDSS) from direct clinician workflows such as computerized provider order entry (CPOE) hinders the uptake of CDSS. This study implemented CDSS in an environment independent of CPOE, introduced to prescribers via academic detailing, to address the dosing of renally [...]

Objective To determine whether a diabetes case management telemedicine intervention reduced healthcare expenditures, as measured by Medicare claims, and to assess the costs of developing and implementing the telemedicine intervention. Design We studied 1665 participants in the Informatics for Diabetes Education and Telemedicine (IDEATel), a randomized controlled trial comparing telemedicine case management of diabetes to usual care. Participants were aged 55 years or older, and resided in federally designated medically [...]

To examine the impact of billing and clinical data extracted from an electronic medical record system on the calculation of an adverse drug event (ADE) quality measure approved for use in The Joint Commission's ORYX program, a mandatory national hospital quality reporting system.

Maintaining a large controlled biomedical vocabulary requires ensuring the content's internal consistency. This is done through rules, specified by the vocabulary's curators, which denote how the vocabulary's concepts should be defined. When individual organizations deploy such vocabularies, local concepts are typically added and linked to concepts in the main vocabulary: the process of maintaining and linking local content should follow the same rules. The operation of content-maintenance software can be [...]

Many healthcare organizations follow data protection policies that specify which patient identifiers must be suppressed to share "de-identified" records. Such policies, however, are often applied without knowledge of the risk of "re-identification". The goals of this work are: (1) to estimate re-identification risk for data sharing policies of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) Privacy Rule; and (2) to evaluate the risk of a specific re-identification attack using [...]

An object identifier (OID) has a central utility in providing a traceable source for the meaning of an identifier appearing in a cross-system communication. The views in this paper illustrate the problems with using the present OID registration system as a reliable source for the identifier, the confusion that the use of an OID introduces in messages, and the redundancy that the OID introduces at the expense of increased message [...]

Mayo Clinic's Enterprise Data Trust is a collection of data from patient care, education, research, and administrative transactional systems, organized to support information retrieval, business intelligence, and high-level decision making. Structurally it is a top-down, subject-oriented, integrated, time-variant, and non-volatile collection of data in support of Mayo Clinic's analytic and decision-making processes. It is an interconnected piece of Mayo Clinic's Enterprise Information Management initiative, which also includes Data Governance, Enterprise [...]