Search AMIA.org

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").

In order to evaluate the accuracy of existing EMR data in predicting follow-up providers, a retrospective analysis was performed on six months of data for inpatient and ED encounters occurring at two hospitals, and on related outpatient data. Sensitivity and Positive Predictive Value (PPV) were calculated for each of eight predictors, to determine their effectiveness in predicting follow-up providers. Our findings indicate that access to longitudinal patient care records can [...]

The purpose of this study was to translate and integrate nursing diagnosis concepts from the Clinical Care Classification (CCC) System Version 2.0 to DiagnosticPhenomenon or nursing diagnostic statements in the International Classification for Nursing Practice (ICNP) Version 1.0. Source concepts for CCC were mapped by the project team, where possible, to pre-coordinated ICNP terms. The manual decomposition of source concepts according to the ICNP 7-Axis Model served to validate the [...]

The fields of health informatics and biomedical research increasingly depend on the availability of aggregated health data. Yet, despite over fifteen years of policy work on health data issues, the United States (U.S.) lacks coherent policy to guide users striving to navigate the ethical, political, technical, and economic challenges associated with health data use. In 2007, building on more than a decade of previous work, the American Medical Informatics Association [...]

OBJECTIVES This study sought to examine the differences between ignoring (naïve) and incorporating dependency (nonnaïve) among linkage variables on the outcome of a probabilistic record linkage study. DESIGN AND MEASUREMENTS We used the outcomes of a previously developed probabilistic linkage procedure for different registries in perinatal care assuming independence among linkage variables. We estimated the impact of ignoring dependency by re-estimating the linkage weights after constructing a variable that combines [...]

The authors organized a Natural Language Processing (NLP) challenge on automatically determining the smoking status of patients from information found in their discharge records. This challenge was issued as a part of the i2b2 (Informatics for Integrating Biology to the Bedside) project, to survey, facilitate, and examine studies in medical language understanding for clinical narratives. This article describes the smoking challenge, details the data and the annotation process, explains the [...]

We describe the architecture of LifeCode (A-Life Medical, Inc.), a natural language processing system for free-text clinical information extraction, our methodology in applying LifeCode to the i2b2 smoking challenge, and statistical measures for performance evaluation. Due to the limited test size and the coefficient of variation in the test standard, it is difficult to draw conclusions regarding the relative efficacy of approaches that were applied to this challenge.

TimeText is a temporal reasoning system designed to represent, extract, and reason about temporal information in clinical text.

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 [...]