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Personal health records (PHRs) can increase patient access to health care information. However, use of PHRs may be unequal by race/ethnicity.

A systematic literature review was performed to identify variables promoting consumer health information technology (CHIT) acceptance among patients. The electronic bibliographic databases Web of Science, Business Source Elite, CINAHL, Communication and Mass Media Complete, MEDLINE, PsycArticles, and PsycInfo were searched. A cited reference search of articles meeting the inclusion criteria was also conducted to reduce misses. Fifty-two articles met the selection criteria. Among them, 94 different variables were tested for [...]

Alerts and prompts represent promising types of decision support in electronic prescribing to tackle inadequacies in prescribing. A systematic review was conducted to evaluate the efficacy of computerized drug alerts and prompts searching EMBASE, CINHAL, MEDLINE, and PsychINFO up to May 2007. Studies assessing the impact of electronic alerts and prompts on clinicians' prescribing behavior were selected and categorized by decision support type. Most alerts and prompts (23 out of [...]

OBJECTIVE The authors previously implemented an electronic heart failure registry at a large academic hospital to identify heart failure patients and to connect these patients with appropriate discharge services. Despite significant improvements in patient identification and connection rates, time to connection remained high, with an average delay of 3.2 days from the time patients were admitted to the time connections were made. Our objective for this current study was to [...]

OBJECTIVE To determine the significance of the English Wikipedia as a source of online health information. DESIGN The authors measured Wikipedia's ranking on general Internet search engines by entering keywords from MedlinePlus, NHS Direct Online, and the National Organization of Rare Diseases as queries into search engine optimization software. We assessed whether article quality influenced this ranking. The authors tested whether traffic to Wikipedia coincided with epidemiological trends and news [...]

The Obesity Challenge, sponsored by Informatics for Integrating Biology and the Bedside (i2b2), a National Center for Biomedical Computing, asked participants to build software systems that could "read" a patient's clinical discharge summary and replicate the judgments of physicians in evaluating presence or absence of obesity and 15 comorbidities. The authors describe their methodology and discuss the results of applying Lockheed Martin's rule-based natural language processing (NLP) capability, ClinREAD. We [...]

OBJECTIVE Automated and disease-specific classification of textual clinical discharge summaries is of great importance in human life science, as it helps physicians to make medical studies by providing statistically relevant data for analysis. This can be further facilitated if, at the labeling of discharge summaries, semantic labels are also extracted from text, such as whether a given disease is present, absent, questionable in a patient, or is unmentioned in the [...]

OBJECTIVE Free-text clinical reports serve as an important part of patient care management and clinical documentation of patient disease and treatment status. Free-text notes are commonplace in medical practice, but remain an under-used source of information for clinical and epidemiological research, as well as personalized medicine. The authors explore the challenges associated with automatically extracting information from clinical reports using their submission to the Integrating Informatics with Biology and the [...]

OBJECTIVE In this study the authors describe the system submitted by the team of University of Szeged to the second i2b2 Challenge in Natural Language Processing for Clinical Data. The challenge focused on the development of automatic systems that analyzed clinical discharge summary texts and addressed the following question: "Who's obese and what co-morbidities do they (definitely/most likely) have?". Target diseases included obesity and its 15 most frequent comorbidities exhibited [...]