Search AMIA.org

Physicians who more intensively interact with electronic health records (EHRs) through their documentation style may pay greater attention to coded fields and clinical decision support and thus may deliver higher quality care. We measured the quality of care of physicians who used three predominating EHR documentation styles: dictation, structured documentation, and free text.

Coreference resolution of concepts, although a very active area in the natural language processing community, has not yet been widely applied to clinical documents. Accordingly, the 2011 i2b2 competition focusing on this area is a timely and useful challenge. The objective of this research was to collate coreferent chains of concepts from a corpus of clinical documents. These concepts are in the categories of person, problems, treatments, and tests.

We describe a novel, crowdsourcing method for generating a knowledge base of problem-medication pairs that takes advantage of manually asserted links between medications and problems.

Clinical research is the foundation for advancing the practice of medicine. However, the lack of seamless integration between clinical research and patient care workflow impedes recruitment efficiency, escalates research costs, and hence threatens the entire clinical research enterprise. Increased use of electronic health records (EHRs) holds promise for facilitating this integration but must surmount regulatory obstacles. Among the unintended consequences of current research oversight are barriers to accessing patient information [...]

This paper describes a natural language processing system for the task of pneumonia identification. Based on the information extracted from the narrative reports associated with a patient, the task is to identify whether or not the patient is positive for pneumonia.

Today's clinical research institutions provide tools for researchers to query their data warehouses for counts of patients. To protect patient privacy, counts are perturbed before reporting; this compromises their utility for increased privacy. The goal of this study is to extend current query answer systems to guarantee a quantifiable level of privacy and allow users to tailor perturbations to maximize the usefulness according to their needs.

The classification of complex or rare patterns in clinical and genomic data requires the availability of a large, labeled patient set. While methods that operate on large, centralized data sources have been extensively used, little attention has been paid to understanding whether models such as binary logistic regression (LR) can be developed in a distributed manner, allowing researchers to share models without necessarily sharing patient data.

Left ventricular ejection fraction (EF) is a key component of heart failure quality measures used within the Department of Veteran Affairs (VA). Our goals were to build a natural language processing system to extract the EF from free-text echocardiogram reports to automate measurement reporting and to validate the accuracy of the system using a comparison reference standard developed through human review. This project was a Translational Use Case Project within [...]

The AMIA Public Health Informatics 2011 Conference brought together members of the public health and health informatics communities to revisit the national agenda developed at the AMIA Spring Congress in 2001, assess the progress that has been made in the past decade, and develop recommendations to further guide the field. Participants met in five discussion tracks: technical framework; research and evaluation; ethics; education, professional training, and workforce development; and sustainability [...]

The fifth i2b2/VA Workshop on Natural Language Processing Challenges for Clinical Records conducted a systematic review on resolution of noun phrase coreference in medical records. Informatics for Integrating Biology and the Bedside (i2b2) and the Veterans Affair (VA) Consortium for Healthcare Informatics Research (CHIR) partnered to organize the coreference challenge. They provided the research community with two corpora of medical records for the development and evaluation of the coreference resolution [...]