Search AMIA.org

Institutions, providers, and informaticians now encourage healthcare consumers to take greater control of their own healthcare needs through improved health and wellness activities, internet-based education and support groups, and personal health records. The author believes that "untethering" all of these activities from provider-based record systems has introduced a form of unhealthy consumer populism. Conversely, integrating these activities in a coordinated manner can sustain both consumer empowerment and consumer well-being.

In 1997, the American Medical Informatics Association proposed a US information strategy that included a population health record (PopHR). Despite subsequent progress on the conceptualization, development, and implementation of electronic health records and personal health records, minimal progress has occurred on the PopHR. Adapting International Organization for Standarization electronic health records standards, we define the PopHR as a repository of statistics, measures, and indicators regarding the state of and influences [...]

The authors developed a computerized algorithm that estimates 'who transmits to whom'--that is, the likeliest transmission paths during an outbreak of person-to-person transmitted illness. This algorithm uses basic information about natural history of the disease, population structure, and chronology of observed symptoms. To assess the algorithm efficacy, the authors built a simulator with parameters describing the disease and the population to simulate random outbreaks of influenza. The algorithm's performance was [...]

Needle electromyography (EMG) is used for the diagnosis of a neural injury in patients with a cervical/lumbar radiculopathy, plexopathy, peripheral neuropathy, or myopathy. Needle EMG is a particularly invasive test and thus it is important to minimize the pain during inspections. In this paper, we introduce the Electrodiagnosis Support System (ESS), which is a clinical decision support system specialized for neural injury diagnosis in the upper limb. ESS can guide [...]

Duplication of medical testing results in a financial burden to the healthcare system. Authors undertook a retrospective review of duplicate testing on patients receiving coordinated care across two institutions, each with its own electronic medical record system. In order to determine whether duplicate testing occurred and if such testing was clinically indicated, authors analyzed records of 85 patients transferred from one site to the other between January 1, 2006 and [...]

Family history information has emerged as an increasingly important tool for clinical care and research. While recent standards provide for structured entry of family history, many clinicians record family history data in text. The authors sought to characterize family history information within clinical documents to assess the adequacy of existing models and create a more comprehensive model for its representation. Models were evaluated on 100 documents containing 238 sentences and [...]

To study how social interactions influence physician adoption of an electronic health records (EHR) system.

De-identified clinical data in standardized form (eg, diagnosis codes), derived from electronic medical records, are increasingly combined with research data (eg, DNA sequences) and disseminated to enable scientific investigations. This study examines whether released data can be linked with identified clinical records that are accessible via various resources to jeopardize patients' anonymity, and the ability of popular privacy protection methodologies to prevent such an attack.

To identify factors in the nursing work domain that contribute to the problem of inpatient falls, aside from patient risk, using cognitive work analysis.

Lack of dose adjustment for renally cleared drugs in the presence of poor renal function is a common problem in the hospital setting. The absence of a clinical decision support system (CDSS) from direct clinician workflows such as computerized provider order entry (CPOE) hinders the uptake of CDSS. This study implemented CDSS in an environment independent of CPOE, introduced to prescribers via academic detailing, to address the dosing of renally [...]