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In 1887, Polish physician Ludovic Zamenhof introduced Esperanto, a simple, easy-to-learn planned language. His goal was to erase communication barriers between ethnic groups by providing them with a politically neutral, culturally free standard language. His ideas received both praise and condemnation from the leaders of his time. Interest in Esperanto peaked in the 1970s but has since faded somewhat. Despite the logical concept and intellectual appeal of a standard language [...]

This study examines how the information provided by a diagnostic decision support system for clinical cases of varying diagnostic difficulty affects physicians' diagnostic performance.

The authors describe a methodology for helping computational biologists diagnose discrepancies they encounter between experimental data and the predictions of scientific models. The authors call these discrepancies data-model conflicts. They have built a prototype system to help scientists resolve these conflicts in a more systematic, evidence-based manner. In computational biology, data-model conflicts are the result of complex computations in which data and models are transformed and evaluated. Increasingly, the data [...]

Non-health-care uses of information technology (IT) provide important lessons for health care informatics that are often overlooked because of the focus on the ways in which health care is different from other domains. Eight examples of IT use outside health care provide a context in which to examine the content and potential relevance of these lessons. Drawn from personal experience, five books, and two interviews, the examples deal with the [...]

Medication errors are common, and while most such errors have little potential for harm they cause substantial extra work in hospitals. A small proportion do have the potential to cause injury, and some cause preventable adverse drug events.

All articles indexed in MEDLINE or CINAHL, related to the use of computer technology in patient education, and published in peer-reviewed journals between 1971 and 1998 were selected for review. Sixty-six articles, including 21 research-based reports, were identified. Forty-five percent of the studies were related to the management of chronic disease. Thirteen studies described an improvement in knowledge scores or clinical outcomes when computer-based patient education was compared with traditional [...]

To investigate whether using a computer-based patient record (CPR) affects the completeness of documentation and appropriateness of documented clinical decisions.

Construction of a resource that provides semantic information about words and phrases to facilitate the computer processing of medical narrative.