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We aim to build and evaluate an open-source natural language processing system for information extraction from electronic medical record clinical free-text. We describe and evaluate our system, the clinical Text Analysis and Knowledge Extraction System (cTAKES), released open-source at http://www.ohnlp.org. The cTAKES builds on existing open-source technologies-the Unstructured Information Management Architecture framework and OpenNLP natural language processing toolkit. Its components, specifically trained for the clinical domain, create rich linguistic and [...]

The objective of this review is to describe the implementation of human factors principles for the design of alerts in clinical information systems. First, we conduct a review of alarm systems to identify human factors principles that are employed in the design and implementation of alerts. Second, we review the medical informatics literature to provide examples of the implementation of human factors principles in current clinical information systems using alerts [...]

The American College of Medical Informatics is an honorary society established to recognize those who have made sustained contributions to the field. Its highest award, for lifetime achievement and contributions to the discipline of medical informatics, is the Morris F Collen Award. Dr Collen's own efforts as a pioneer in the field stand out as the embodiment of creativity, intellectual rigor, perseverance, and personal integrity. The Collen Award, given once [...]

Many e-prescribing systems allow for both structured and free-text fields in prescriptions, making possible internal discrepancies. This study reviewed 2914 electronic prescriptions that contained free-text fields. Internal discrepancies were found in 16.1% of the prescriptions. Most (83.8%) of the discrepancies could potentially lead to adverse events and many (16.8%) to severe adverse events, involving a hospital admission or death. Discrepancies in doses, routes or complex regimens were most likely to [...]

Health IT implementations often introduce radical changes to clinical work processes and workflow. Prior research investigating this effect has shown conflicting results. Recent time and motion studies have consistently found that this impact is negligible; whereas qualitative studies have repeatedly revealed negative end-user perceptions suggesting decreased efficiency and disrupted workflow. We speculate that this discrepancy may be due in part to the design of the time and motion studies, which [...]

To classify automatically lung tumor-node-metastases (TNM) cancer stages from free-text pathology reports using symbolic rule-based classification.

Physician practices may adopt and use electronic prescribing (eRx) in response to mandates, incentives, and perceived value of the technology. Yet, for the most part, diffusion has been limited and geographically confined, and even when adopted, use of eRx in many practices has been low. One explanation for this phenomenon is that decision-makers in the practices possess different technological viewpoints (frames) related to eRx and these frames have formed the [...]

Studies that have looked at the effectiveness of computerized decision support systems to prevent drug-drug interactions have reported modest results because of low response by the providers to the automated alerts.

Immunosuppressive therapy following transplantation, if not managed well, can lead to increased drug toxicity or rejection episodes. We investigated whether use of an automated clinical management system in our liver transplant program would improve clinical outcomes in managing transplant recipients' immunosuppressive medications.

Colorectal cancer (CRC) screening rates are low despite confirmed benefits. The authors investigated the use of natural language processing (NLP) to identify previous colonoscopy screening in electronic records from a random sample of 200 patients at least 50 years old. The authors developed algorithms to recognize temporal expressions and 'status indicators', such as 'patient refused', or 'test scheduled'. The new methods were added to the existing KnowledgeMap concept identifier system [...]