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Technology has great potential to reduce medication errors in hospitals. This case report describes barriers to, and facilitators of, the implementation of a pharmacy bar code scanning system to reduce medication dispensing errors at a large academic medical center. Ten pharmacy staff were interviewed about their experiences during the implementation. Interview notes were iteratively reviewed to identify common themes. The authors identified three main barriers to pharmacy bar code scanning [...]

The Internet's potential to bolster health promotion and disease prevention efforts has attracted considerable attention. Existing research leaves two things unclear, however: the prevalence of online health and medical information seeking and the distinguishing characteristics of individuals who seek that information.

There are limited data on adverse drug event rates in pediatrics. The authors describe the implementation and evaluation of an automated surveillance system modified to detect adverse drug events (ADEs) in pediatric patients. The authors constructed an automated surveillance system to screen admissions to a large pediatric hospital. Potential ADEs identified by the system were reviewed by medication safety pharmacists and a physician and scored for causality and severity. Over [...]

This study sought to develop and evaluate an approach for auditing the semantic completeness of the SNOMED CT contents using a formal concept analysis (FCA)-based model.

Chemical concepts assigned multiple "Chemical Viewed Structurally" semantic types (STs) in the Unified Medical Language System (UMLS) are subject to ambiguous interpretation. The multiple assignments may denote the fact that a specific represented chemical (combination) is a conjugate, derived via a chemical reaction of chemicals of the different types, or a complex, composed of a mixture of such chemicals. The previously introduced Refined Semantic Network (RSN) is modified to properly [...]

Surgical Process Models (SPMs) are models of surgical interventions. The objectives of this study are to validate acquisition methods for Surgical Process Models and to assess the performance of different observer populations.

Electronic clinical documentation can be useful for activities such as public health surveillance, quality improvement, and research, but existing methods of de-identification may not provide sufficient protection of patient data. The general-purpose natural language processor MedLEE retains medical concepts while excluding the remaining text so, in addition to processing text into structured data, it may be able provide a secondary benefit of de-identification. Without modifying the system, the authors tested [...]

Only half of consultants' medical recommendations are implemented. We created a tool that lets referring providers review and implement electronic recommendations made by consultants, with the hypothesis that facilitation with our tool could improve implementation.

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 [...]

Previous studies have shown the importance of workflow issues in the implementation of CPOE systems and patient safety practices. To understand the impact of CPOE on clinical workflow, we developed a conceptual framework and conducted a literature search for CPOE evaluations between 1990 and June 2007. Fifty-one publications were identified that disclosed mixed effects of CPOE systems. Among the frequently reported workflow advantages were the legible orders, remote accessibility of [...]