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Healthcare organizations continue to adopt information technologies with clinical decision support (CDS) to prevent potential medication-related adverse drug events. End-users who are unfamiliar with certain high-risk patient populations are at an increased risk of unknowingly causing medication errors. The following case describes a heart transplant recipient exposed to supra-therapeutic concentrations of tacrolimus during co-administration of ritonavir as a result of vendor supplied CDS tools that omitted an interaction alert. After [...]

Logical Observation Identifiers Names and Codes (LOINC) mapping of laboratory data is often a question of the effort of mapping compared with the benefits of the structure achieved. The new LOINC mapping assistant RELMA (version 2011) has the potential to reduce the effort required for semi-automated mapping. We examined quality, time effort, and sustainability of such mapping.

At the 2011 American College of Medical Informatics (ACMI) Winter Symposium we studied the overlap between health IT and economics and what leading healthcare delivery organizations are achieving today using IT that might offer paths for the nation to follow for using health IT in healthcare reform. We recognized that health IT by itself can improve health value, but its main contribution to health value may be that it can [...]

Secondary use of clinical text is impeded by a lack of highly effective, low-cost de-identification methods. Both, manual and automated methods for removing protected health information, are known to leave behind residual identifiers. The authors propose a novel approach for addressing the residual identifier problem based on the theory of Hiding In Plain Sight (HIPS).

To assess the effect of a clinical decision support system (CDSS) integrated into an electronic health record (EHR) on antibiotic prescribing for acute respiratory infections (ARIs) in primary care.

To evaluate systems for estimating and preventing wrong-patient electronic orders in computerized physician order entry systems with a two-phase study.

An enduring challenge in personalized medicine lies in selecting the right drug for each individual patient. While testing of drugs on patients in large trials is the only way to assess their clinical efficacy and toxicity, we dramatically lack resources to test the hundreds of drugs currently under development. Therefore the use of preclinical model systems has been intensively investigated as this approach enables response to hundreds of drugs to [...]

Private data analysis-the useful analysis of confidential data-requires a rigorous and practicable definition of privacy. Differential privacy, an emerging standard, is the subject of intensive investigation in several diverse research communities. We review the definition, explain its motivation, and discuss some of the challenges to bringing this concept to practice.

To determine how well statistical text mining (STM) models can identify falls within clinical text associated with an ambulatory encounter.