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Existing data stored in a hospital's transactional servers have enormous potential to improve performance measurement and health care quality. Accessing, organizing, and using these data to support research and quality improvement projects are evolving challenges for hospital systems. The authors report development of a clinical data warehouse that they created by importing data from the information systems of three affiliated public hospitals. They describe their methodology; difficulties encountered; responses from [...]

The aim of this study was to create a classifier for automatic detection of chest radiograph reports consistent with the mediastinal findings of inhalational anthrax.

This report describes the design and implementation of the Real-time Outbreak and Disease Surveillance (RODS) system, a computer-based public health surveillance system for early detection of disease outbreaks. Hospitals send RODS data from clinical encounters over virtual private networks and leased lines using the Health Level 7 (HL7) message protocol. The data are sent in real time. RODS automatically classifies the registration chief complaint from the visit into one of [...]

The authors implemented an electronic medical record system in a rural Kenyan health center. Visit data are recorded on a paper encounter form, eliminating duplicate documentation in multiple clinic logbooks. Data are entered into an MS-Access database supported by redundant power systems. The system was initiated in February 2001, and 10,000 visit records were entered for 6,190 patients in six months. The authors present a summary of the clinics visited [...]

The authors describe a research group that supports the needs of investigators seeking data from an electronic medical record system. Since its creation in 1972, the Regenstrief Medical Records System has captured and stored more than 350 million discrete coded observations on two million patients. This repository has become a central data source for prospective and retrospective research. It is accessed by six data analysts--working closely with the institutional review [...]

Data representations on today's medical monitors need to be improved to advance clinical awareness and prevent data vigilance errors. Simply building graphical displays does not ensure an improvement in clinical performance because displays have to be consistent with the user's clinical processes and mental models. In this report, the development of an original pulmonary graphical display for anesthesia is used as an example to show an iterative design process with [...]

Detecting adverse events is pivotal for measuring and improving medical safety, yet current techniques discourage routine screening. The authors hypothesized that discharge summaries would include information on adverse events, and they developed and evaluated an electronic method for screening medical discharge summaries for adverse events.

The Heart Disease Program (HDP) is a novel computerized diagnosis program incorporating a computer model of cardiovascular physiology. Physicians can enter standard clinical data and receive a differential diagnosis with explanations.

To analyze the effect of expert knowledge on the inductive learning process in creating classifiers for medical text reports.