Search AMIA.org

Health care systems are increasingly utilizing electronic medical record-associated patient portals to facilitate communication with patients and between providers and their patients. These patient portals are growing in recognition as potentially valuable research tools. While there is much information about the response rates and demographics of internet-based surveys as well as the demographics of patients who are portal members, not much is known about the response rate of internet-based surveys [...]

Electronic health record (EHR) data aggregated from multiple, non-affiliated, sources provide an important resource for biomedical research, including digital phenotyping. Unlike work with EHR data from a single organization, aggregate EHR data introduces a number of analysis challenges.

Achieving unbiased recognition of eligible patients for clinical trials from their narrative longitudinal clinical records can be time consuming. We describe and evaluate a knowledge-driven method that identifies whether a patient meets a selected set of 13 eligibility clinical trial criteria from their longitudinal clinical records, which was one of the tasks of the 2018 National NLP Clinical Challenges.

Patient portal use has increased over the last two decades in response to consumer demand and government regulation. Despite growing adoption, few guidelines exist to direct successful implementation and governance. We describe the policies and procedures that have governed over a decade of continuous My Health at Vanderbilt (MHAV) patient portal use.

Identification of hospitalized patients with suddenly unfavorable clinical course remains challenging. Models using objective data elements from the electronic health record may miss important sources of information available to nurses.

Third-party platforms have emerged to support small primary care practices for calculating and reporting electronic clinical quality measures (eCQM) for federal programs like The Medicare Access and CHIP Reauthorization Act of 2015 (MACRA) and Merit-based Incentive Payment System (MIPS). Yet little is known about the capabilities and limitations of electronic health record systems (EHRs) to enable data access for these programs. We connected 116 small- to medium-sized practices with seven [...]

Data sharing agreements that clearly describe what individuals are agreeing to and what responsibilities data stewards will undertake are crucial for the establishment, maintenance, and flourishing of genomic datasets. To optimize genomic data resources, researchers, care professionals, and informaticians must regard system design, user objectives, and environmental considerations through users' eyes, identifying fundamental values on which to build and potential barriers to success that must be avoided. Design of agreements [...]

An important component of processing medical texts is the identification of synonymous words or phrases. Synonyms can inform learned representations of patients or improve linking mentioned concepts to medical ontologies. However, medical synonyms can be lexically similar ("dilated RA" and "dilated RV") or dissimilar ("cerebrovascular accident" and "stroke"); contextual information can determine if 2 strings are synonymous. Medical professionals utilize extensive variation of medical terminology, often not evidenced in structured [...]

Scalable informatics solutions that provide molecularly tailored treatment recommendations to clinicians are needed to streamline precision oncology in care settings.