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This study sought to describe the evolution, use, and user satisfaction of a patient Web site providing a shared medical record between patients and health professionals at Group Health Cooperative, a mixed-model health care financing and delivery organization based in Seattle, Washington.

To evaluate: (1) the effectiveness of wireless handheld computers for online information retrieval in clinical settings; (2) the role of MEDLINE in answering clinical questions raised at the point of care.

Current efforts to define and implement health data standards are driven by issues related to the quality, cost and continuity of care, patient safety concerns, and desires to speed clinical research findings to the bedside. The President's goal for national adoption of electronic medical records in the next decade, coupled with the current emphasis on translational research, underscore the urgent need for data standards in clinical research. This paper reviews [...]

Inefficiencies in clinical trial data collection cause delays, increase costs, and may reduce clinician participation in medical research. In this proof-of-concept study, we examine the feasibility of using point-of-care data capture for both the medical record and clinical research in the setting of a working clinical trial. We hypothesized that by doing so, we could increase reuse of patient data, eliminate redundant data entry, and minimize disruption to clinic workflow.

To specify and identify disease and patient care processes represented by temporal patterns in clinical events and observations, and retrieve patient populations containing those patterns from clinical data repositories, in support of clinical research, outcomes studies, and quality assurance.

Part-of-speech tagging represents an important first step for most medical natural language processing (NLP) systems. The majority of current statistically-based POS taggers are trained using a general English corpus. Consequently, these systems perform poorly on medical text. Annotated medical corpora are difficult to develop because of the time and labor required. We investigated a heuristic-based sample selection method to minimize annotated corpus size for retraining a Maximum Entropy (ME) POS [...]

This paper describes a successful approach to de-identification that was developed to participate in a recent AMIA-sponsored challenge evaluation.

Clinical investigators often preprocess, process, and analyze their data without benefit of formally organized research centers to oversee data management. This article outlines a practical three-file structure to help guide these investigators track and document their data through processing and analyses. The proposed process can be implemented without additional training or specialized software. Thus, it is particularly well suited for research projects with small budgets or limited access to viable [...]

We assessed whether medication safety improved when a medication profiling program was added to a computerized provider order entry system.

Personal health records (PHRs) hold great promise for empowering patients and increasing the accuracy and completeness of health information. We reviewed two small USB-based PHR devices that allow a patient to easily store and transport their personal health information. Both devices offer password protection and encryption features. Analysis of the devices shows that they store their data in a Microsoft Access database. Due to a flaw in the encryption of [...]