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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.

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 [...]

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 [...]

OBJECTIVE Automated and disease-specific classification of textual clinical discharge summaries is of great importance in human life science, as it helps physicians to make medical studies by providing statistically relevant data for analysis. This can be further facilitated if, at the labeling of discharge summaries, semantic labels are also extracted from text, such as whether a given disease is present, absent, questionable in a patient, or is unmentioned in the [...]

OBJECTIVE In this study the authors describe the system submitted by the team of University of Szeged to the second i2b2 Challenge in Natural Language Processing for Clinical Data. The challenge focused on the development of automatic systems that analyzed clinical discharge summary texts and addressed the following question: "Who's obese and what co-morbidities do they (definitely/most likely) have?". Target diseases included obesity and its 15 most frequent comorbidities exhibited [...]

CONTEXT Telemedicine is a promising but largely unproven technology for providing case management services to patients with chronic conditions and lower access to care. OBJECTIVES To examine the effectiveness of a telemedicine intervention to achieve clinical management goals in older, ethnically diverse, medically underserved patients with diabetes. DESIGN, Setting, and Patients A randomized controlled trial was conducted, comparing telemedicine case management to usual care, with blinded outcome evaluation, in 1,665 [...]

Emergency department crowding threatens quality and access to health care, and a method of accurately forecasting near-future crowding should enable novel ways to alleviate the problem. The authors sought to implement and validate the previously developed ForecastED discrete event simulation for real-time forecasting of emergency department crowding.

The authors studied current levels of computerization in dental clinics and the attitudes of dentists towards dental computerization in metropolises in China. A survey consisting of 22 questions was e-mailed or mailed to a random sample of 354 dentists. Of all respondents, 80.5% reported using a computer in their practice. The authors found that administrative tasks were the first to be computerized. A majority of respondents supported the statement that [...]