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Health care generated data have become an important source for clinical and genomic research. Often, investigators create and iteratively refine phenotype algorithms to achieve high positive predictive values (PPVs) or sensitivity, thereby identifying valid cases and controls. These algorithms achieve the greatest utility when validated and shared by multiple health care systems.Materials and Methods We report the current status and impact of the Phenotype KnowledgeBase (PheKB, http://phekb.org), an online environment [...]

To describe the characteristics and online practices of patients and "care partners" who share explicit access to a patient portal account at a large integrated health system that implemented shared access functionality in 2003.

The sexual transmission of enteric diseases poses an important public health challenge. We aimed to build a prediction model capable of identifying individuals with a reported enteric disease who could be at risk of acquiring future sexually transmitted infections (STIs).

Maintaining patient privacy is a challenge in large-scale observational research. To assist in reducing the risk of identifying study subjects through publicly available data, we introduce a method for obscuring date information for clinical events and patient characteristics.

Physicians are expending tremendous resources transitioning to new electronic health records (EHRs), with electronic prescribing as a key functionality of most systems. Physician dissatisfaction post-transition can be quite marked, especially initially. However, little is known about how physicians' experiences using new EHRs for e-prescribing evolve over time. We previously published a qualitative case study about the early physician experience transitioning from an older to a newer, more robust EHR, in [...]

Cloud computing promises to essentially improve healthcare delivery performance. However, shifting sensitive medical records to third-party cloud providers could create an adoption hurdle because of security and privacy concerns.

Asthma is a common childhood chronic lung disease affecting greater than 10% of children in the United States. School nurses are in a unique position to close gaps in care. Indeed, effective asthma management is more likely to result when providers, family, and schools work together to optimize the patient's treatment plan. Currently, effective communication between schools and healthcare systems through electronic medical record (EMR) systems remains a challenge. The [...]

Patient access to care has been a known and continuing struggle for many health care providers. In spite of appointment lead time policies set by government or clinics, the problem persists. Justification for how lead time policies are determined is lacking.