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The Clinical Outcomes Assessment Toolkit (COAT) was created through a collaboration between the University of California, Los Angeles and Brigham and Women's Hospital to address the challenge of gathering, formatting, and abstracting data for clinical outcomes and performance measurement research. COAT provides a framework for the development of information pipelines to transform clinical data from its original structured, semi-structured, and unstructured forms to a standardized format amenable to statistical analysis [...]

Knowledge about people and organizational issues pertinent to implementation and maintenance of clinical systems has grown steadily over the past fifteen years. Less is known about implementation of systems used for clinical and biomedical research. In conjunction with current National Institutes of Health Roadmap efforts that promote translational research, these issues should now be identified and addressed. During the 2007 American College of Medical Informatics Symposium, members discussed behavioral aspects [...]

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 [...]

To develop a security infrastructure to support controlled and secure access to data and analytical resources in a biomedical research Grid environment, while facilitating resource sharing among collaborators.

This paper presents a multiple perspectives model of clinical information system implementation, the CONTEXTual Implementation Model (CIM). Although other implementation models have been developed, few are grounded in data and others fail to take adequate account of the clinical environment and users' requirements.

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 [...]

Over the past year, several payers, employers, and commercial vendors have announced personal health record projects. Few of these are widely deployed and few are fully integrated into ambulatory or hospital-based electronic record systems. The earliest adopters of personal health records have many lessons learned that can inform these new initiatives. We present three case studies--MyChart at Palo Alto Medical Foundation, PatientSite at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, and Indivo [...]

Patients, policymakers, providers, payers, employers, and others have increasing interest in using personal health records (PHRs) to improve healthcare costs, quality, and efficiency. While organizations now invest millions of dollars in PHRs, the best PHR architectures, value propositions, and descriptions are not universally agreed upon. Despite widespread interest and activity, little PHR research has been done to date, and targeted research investment in PHRs appears inadequate. The authors reviewed the [...]

Infobuttons are decision support tools that provide links within electronic medical record systems to relevant content in online information resources. The aim of infobuttons is to help clinicians promptly meet their information needs. The objective of this study was to determine whether infobutton links that direct to specific content topics ("topic links") are more effective than links that point to general overview content ("nonspecific links").