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The substantial growth in mobile handheld technologies has heralded the opportunity to provide physicians with access to information, resources, and people at the right time and place. But is this technology delivering the benefits to workflow and patient care promised by increased mobility? The authors conducted a systematic review to examine evidence regarding the impact of mobile handheld technology on hospital physicians' work practices and patient care, focusing on quantification [...]

Each Unified Medical Language System (UMLS) concept is assigned one or more semantic types (ST). A dynamic methodology for aiding an auditor in finding concepts that are missing the assignment of a given ST, S is presented.

To compare users' speed, number of entry errors and satisfaction in using two current devices for electronic data collection in clinical research: handheld and laptop computers.

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 [...]

Patient portals may improve pediatric chronic disease outcomes, but few have been rigorously evaluated for usability by parents. Using scenario-based testing with think-aloud protocols, we evaluated the usability of portals for parents of children with cystic fibrosis, diabetes or arthritis. DESIGN Sixteen parents used a prototype and test data to complete 14 tasks followed by a validated satisfaction questionnaire. Three iterations of the prototype were used.

Personal health records (PHRs) can increase patient access to health care information. However, use of PHRs may be unequal by race/ethnicity.

OBJECTIVE To facilitate patient handoffs between physicians, the computerized patient handoff tool (PHT) extracts information from the electronic health record to populate a form that is printed and given to the cross-cover physician. OBJECTIVES were to: (1) evaluate the rate at which data elements of interest were extracted from the electronic health record into the PHT, (2) assess the frequency for needing information beyond that contained in the PHT and [...]

OBJECTIVE The authors previously implemented an electronic heart failure registry at a large academic hospital to identify heart failure patients and to connect these patients with appropriate discharge services. Despite significant improvements in patient identification and connection rates, time to connection remained high, with an average delay of 3.2 days from the time patients were admitted to the time connections were made. Our objective for this current study was to [...]

OBJECTIVE To determine the significance of the English Wikipedia as a source of online health information. DESIGN The authors measured Wikipedia's ranking on general Internet search engines by entering keywords from MedlinePlus, NHS Direct Online, and the National Organization of Rare Diseases as queries into search engine optimization software. We assessed whether article quality influenced this ranking. The authors tested whether traffic to Wikipedia coincided with epidemiological trends and news [...]