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Clinicians are increasingly using handheld computers (HC) during patient care. We sought to assess the role of HC-based clinical reference software in medical practice by conducting a survey and assessing actual usage behavior.

The VeriChip is a Radio-Frequency Identification (RFID) tag produced commercially for implantation in human beings. Its proposed uses include identification of medical patients, physical access control, contactless retail payment, and even the tracing of kidnapping victims. As the authors explain, the VeriChip is vulnerable to simple, over-the-air spoofing attacks. In particular, an attacker capable of scanning a VeriChip, eavesdropping on its signal, or simply learning its serial number can create [...]

Acquiring and representing biomedical knowledge is an increasingly important component of contemporary bioinformatics. A critical step of the process is to identify and retrieve relevant documents among the vast volume of modern biomedical literature efficiently. In the real world, many information retrieval tasks are difficult because of high data dimensionality and the lack of annotated examples to train a retrieval algorithm. Under such a scenario, the performance of information retrieval [...]

The authors evaluated the retrieval power of PubMed "Clinical Queries," narrow search string, about therapy in comparison with a modified search string to avoid possible retrieval bias. PubMed search strategy was compared to a slightly modified string that included the Britannic English term "randomised." The authors tested the two strings joined onto each of four terms concerning topics of broad interest: hypertension, hepatitis, diabetes, and heart failure. In particular, precision [...]

“The army called me down to New York [in 1950]. I was with New York University (NYU)—and the colonel said to me, ‘Well, if you volunteer to be in the army, then you'll become a lieutenant, an officer. But if you don't volunteer, you'll be drafted anyway, and sent to boot camp. So I volunteered. And they sent me to medical field service school in Fort Sam Houston, Texas. And [...]

The literature of home telehealth technology recommends that systems be designed to minimize their obtrusiveness to end users. However, this term is neither explicitly defined nor consistently used. This paper presents a definition of the concept of obtrusiveness. Within this definition, twenty-two categories of what may be perceived as obtrusive in home telehealth technology are proposed based on a review of the literature. These categories are grouped into eight dimensions [...]

There is a critical gap in our nation's ability to accurately measure and manage the quality of medical care. A robust healthcare quality information system (HQIS) has the potential to address this deficiency through the capture, codification, and analysis of information about patient treatments and related outcomes. Because non-technical issues often present the greatest challenges, this paper provides an overview of these socio-technical issues in building a successful HQIS, including [...]

Diverse data sets have become key building blocks of translational biomedical research. Data types captured and referenced by sophisticated research studies include high throughput genomic and proteomic data, laboratory data, data from imagery, and outcome data. In this paper, the authors present the application of an XML-based data management system to support integration of data from disparate data sources and large data sets. This system facilitates management of XML schemas [...]