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The Patient-Centered Access to Secure Systems Online (PCASSO) project is designed to apply state-of-the-art-security to the communication of clinical information over the Internet.

Stanford's two decades of success in linking medical informatics and health services research in both training and investigational activities reflects advantageous geography and history as well as natural synergies in the two areas. Health services research and medical informatics at Stanford have long shared a quantitative, analytic orientation, along with linked administration, curriculum, and clinical activities. Both the medical informatics and the health services research curricula draw on diverse course [...]

The events that followed the launch of Sputnik on Oct 4, 1957, provide a metaphor for the events that are following the first bioterroristic case of pulmonary anthrax in the United States. This paper uses that metaphor to elucidate the nature of the task ahead and to suggest questions such as, Can the goals of the biodefense effort be formulated as concisely and concretely as the goal of the space [...]

The Columbia University Informatics for Diabetes Education and Telemedicine (IDEATel) Project is a four-year demonstration project funded by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services with the overall goals of evaluating the feasibility, acceptability, effectiveness, and cost-effectiveness of telemedicine in the management of older patients with diabetes. The study is designed as a randomized controlled trial and is being conducted by a state-wide consortium in New York. Eligibility requires that [...]

Medical informatics systems are often designed to perform at the level of human experts. Evaluation of the performance of these systems is often constrained by lack of reference standards, either because the appropriate response is not known or because no simple appropriate response exists. Even when performance can be assessed, it is not always clear whether the performance is sufficient or reasonable. These challenges can be addressed if an evaluator [...]

The growth of the biomedical literature presents special challenges for both human readers and automatic algorithms. One such challenge derives from the common and uncontrolled use of abbreviations in the literature. Each additional abbreviation increases the effective size of the vocabulary for a field. Therefore, to create an automatically generated and maintained lexicon of abbreviations, we have developed an algorithm to match abbreviations in text with their expansions.

In addition to providing new capabilities, the introduction of technology in complex, sociotechnical systems, such as health care and aviation, can have unanticipated side effects on technical, social, and organizational dimensions. To identify potential accidents in the making, the authors looked for side effects from a natural experiment, the implementation of bar code medication administration (BCMA), a technology designed to reduce adverse drug events (ADEs).