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To effectively meet clinician information needs at the point of care, we must understand how their needs are dependent on both context and clinician type. The Infobutton Manager (IM), accessed through a clinical information system, anticipates the clinician's questions and provides links to pertinent electronic resources. We conducted an observational usefulness case study of medical residents (MDs), nurse practitioners (NPs), registered nurses (RNs), and a physician assistant (PA), using the [...]

Health care providers are legally obliged to report cases of specified diseases to public health authorities, but existing manual, provider-initiated reporting systems generally result in incomplete, error-prone, and tardy information flow. Automated laboratory-based reports are more likely accurate and timely, but lack clinical information and treatment details. Here, we describe the Electronic Support for Public Health (ESP) application, a robust, automated, secure, portable public health detection and messaging system for [...]

The Massachusetts eHealth Collaborative (MAeHC) was formed to improve patient safety and quality of care by promoting the use of health information technology through community-based implementation of electronic health records (EHRs) and health information exchange. The Collaborative has recently implemented EHRs in a diverse set of competitively selected communities, encompassing nearly 500 physicians serving over 500,000 patients. Targeting both EHR implementation and health information exchange at the community level has [...]

To develop methods for building corpus-specific sense inventories of abbreviations occurring in clinical documents.

This paper evaluates the retrieval effectiveness of relevance ranking strategies on a collection of 55 queries and about 160,000 MEDLINE((R)) citations used in the 2006 and 2007 Text Retrieval Conference (TREC) Genomics Tracks. The authors study two relevance ranking strategies: term frequency-inverse document frequency (TF-IDF) weighting and sentence-level co-occurrence, and examine their ability to rank retrieved MEDLINE documents given user queries. Furthermore, the authors use the reverse chronological order-PubMed's default [...]

The growing numbers of topically relevant biomedical publications readily available due to advances in document retrieval methods pose a challenge to clinicians practicing evidence-based medicine. It is increasingly time consuming to acquire and critically appraise the available evidence. This problem could be addressed in part if methods were available to automatically recognize rigorous studies immediately applicable in a specific clinical situation. We approach the problem of recognizing studies containing useable [...]

As patient care becomes more collaborative in nature, there is a need for information technology that supports interdisciplinary practices of care. This study developed and performed usability testing of a standalone computer-based information tool to support the interdisciplinary practice of palliative severe pain management (SPM).

Effective health communication is often hindered by a "vocabulary gap" between language familiar to consumers and jargon used in medical practice and research. To present health information to consumers in a comprehensible fashion, we need to develop a mechanism to quantify health terms as being more likely or less likely to be understood by typical members of the lay public. Prior research has used approaches including syllable count, easy word [...]

Efficient information management and communication within the emergency department (ED) is essential to providing timely and high-quality patient care. The ED whiteboard (census board) usually serves as an ED's central access point for operational and patient-related information. This article describes the design, functionality, and experiences with a computerized ED whiteboard, which has the ability to display relevant operational and patient-related information in real time. Embedded functionality, additional whiteboard views, and [...]