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This report provides updated estimates on use of electronic medical records (EMRs) in US home health and hospice (HHH) agencies, describes utilization of EMR functionalities, and presents novel data on telemedicine and point of care documentation (PoCD) in this setting.

Reducing custom software development effort is an important goal in information retrieval (IR). This study evaluated a generalizable approach involving with no custom software or rules development. The study used documents "consistent with cancer" to evaluate system performance in the domains of colorectal (CRC), prostate (PC), and lung (LC) cancer. Using an end-user-supplied reference set, the automated retrieval console (ARC) iteratively calculated performance of combinations of natural language processing-derived features [...]

Institutions, providers, and informaticians now encourage healthcare consumers to take greater control of their own healthcare needs through improved health and wellness activities, internet-based education and support groups, and personal health records. The author believes that "untethering" all of these activities from provider-based record systems has introduced a form of unhealthy consumer populism. Conversely, integrating these activities in a coordinated manner can sustain both consumer empowerment and consumer well-being.

In 1997, the American Medical Informatics Association proposed a US information strategy that included a population health record (PopHR). Despite subsequent progress on the conceptualization, development, and implementation of electronic health records and personal health records, minimal progress has occurred on the PopHR. Adapting International Organization for Standarization electronic health records standards, we define the PopHR as a repository of statistics, measures, and indicators regarding the state of and influences [...]

Needle electromyography (EMG) is used for the diagnosis of a neural injury in patients with a cervical/lumbar radiculopathy, plexopathy, peripheral neuropathy, or myopathy. Needle EMG is a particularly invasive test and thus it is important to minimize the pain during inspections. In this paper, we introduce the Electrodiagnosis Support System (ESS), which is a clinical decision support system specialized for neural injury diagnosis in the upper limb. ESS can guide [...]

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 [...]

De-identified clinical data in standardized form (eg, diagnosis codes), derived from electronic medical records, are increasingly combined with research data (eg, DNA sequences) and disseminated to enable scientific investigations. This study examines whether released data can be linked with identified clinical records that are accessible via various resources to jeopardize patients' anonymity, and the ability of popular privacy protection methodologies to prevent such an attack.

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 [...]

Recent federal policies and actions support the adoption of health information exchange (HIE) in order to improve healthcare by addressing fragmented personal health information. However, concerted efforts at facilitating HIE have existed for over two decades in this country. The lessons of these experiences include a recurrence of barriers and challenges beyond those associated with technology. Without new strategies, the current support and methods of facilitating HIE may not address [...]

The authors report on the development of the Cancer Tissue Information Extraction System (caTIES)--an application that supports collaborative tissue banking and text mining by leveraging existing natural language processing methods and algorithms, grid communication and security frameworks, and query visualization methods. The system fills an important need for text-derived clinical data in translational research such as tissue-banking and clinical trials. The design of caTIES addresses three critical issues for informatics [...]