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For the past decade, Stanford Medical Informatics has combined clinical informatics and bioinformatics research and training in an explicit way. The interest in applying informatics techniques to both clinical problems and problems in basic science can be traced to the Dendral project in the 1960s. Having bioinformatics and clinical informatics in the same academic unit is still somewhat unusual and can lead to clashes of clinical and basic science cultures [...]

This paper provides a "viewpoint discussion" based on a presentation made to the 2000 Symposium of the American College of Medical Informatics. It discusses potential opportunities for researchers in health informatics to become involved in the rapidly growing field of bioinformatics, using the activities of the Yale Center for Medical Informatics as a case study. One set of opportunities occurs where bioinformatics research itself intersects with the clinical world. Examples [...]

The authors' goal was to determine whether dynamic categorization, a new technique for organizing search results, is more useful than the two existing organizational techniques: relevance ranking and clustering. They define a useful tool as one that helps users learn about the kinds of information that pertain to their query, find answers to their questions efficiently and easily, and feel satisfied with their search experience.

The development of integrated health care systems, the building of distributed computer networks throughout them, and the advent of easy-to-use electronic medical records for ambulatory practices combine to create a powerful argument for an enterprise electronic medical record. Potential customers need to learn from both successes and failures. Although the author could find in the literature only two reports of failures, a survey of family practice residencies revealed ten programs [...]

Health care leaders emphasize the need to include information technology and informatics concepts in formal education programs, yet integration of informatics into health educational programs has progressed slowly. The AMIA 1999 Spring Congress was held to address informatics educational issues across health professions, including the educational needs in the various health professions, goals for health informatics education, and implementation strategies to achieve these goals. This paper presents the results from [...]

The objective of the 1999 Nursing Vocabulary Summit Conference was to seek consensus on and a common approach to the development of nursing terminology standards for use in information systems.

The authors consider the problem of exact string pattern matching using algorithms that do not require any preprocessing. To choose the most appropriate algorithm, distinctive features of the medical language must be taken into account. The characteristics of medical language are emphasized in this regard, the best algorithm of those reviewed is proposed, and detailed evaluations of time complexity for processing medical texts are provided.

Integrating data that reside in different systems remains an often laborious process, requiring either manual steps or complicated programming. This paper describes a method for state-mandated reporting of childhood blood lead testing results that makes use of object linking and embedding technology and readily available software products to pull together information from different legacy systems. A terminal session emulator employs object linking and embedding automation to extract host data, and [...]

The "vocabulary problem" has long plagued the developers, implementers, and users of computer-based systems. The authors review selected activities of the Health Level 7 (HL7) Vocabulary Technical Committee that are related to vocabulary domain specification for HL7 coded data elements. These activities include: 1) the development of two sets of principles to provide guidance to terminology stakeholders, including organizations seeking to deploy HL7-compliant systems, terminology developers, and terminology integrators; 2) [...]

The authors have developed a Web-based system that provides summary information about clinical trials being conducted throughout the United States. The first version of the system, publicly available in February 2000, contains more than 4,000 records representing primarily trials sponsored by the National Institutes of Health. The impetus for this system has come from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) Modernization Act of 1997, which mandated a registry of both [...]