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The Unified Medical Language System (UMLS) combines many well-established authoritative medical informatics terminologies in one knowledge representation system. Such a resource is very valuable to the health care community and industry. However, the UMLS is very large and complex and poses serious comprehension problems for users and maintenance personnel. The authors present a representation to support the user's comprehension and navigation of the UMLS.

To create "extensional definitions" of laboratory codes from derived characteristics of coded values in a clinical database and then use these definitions in the automated mapping of codes between disparate facilities.

Health care leaders emphasize the need to include information technology and informatics concepts in formal education programs, yet integration of informatics into health educational programs has progressed slowly. The AMIA 1999 Spring Congress was held to address informatics educational issues across health professions, including the educational needs in the various health professions, goals for health informatics education, and implementation strategies to achieve these goals. This paper presents the results from [...]

Terminology work in nursing has given rise to an increasing number of nursing terminologies. These generally take the form of controlled vocabularies. Because of the limitations of the controlled vocabulary approach, individual terminologies tend to be tuned to meet the specific needs of their intended users. Differences between terminologies are now a significant barrier to the comparison and interchange of health information. To agree on a single, multipurpose terminology would [...]

To develop a guideline document model that includes a sufficiently broad set of concepts to be useful throughout the guideline life cycle.

Recent research has studied the communication behaviors of clinical hospital workers and observed a tendency for these workers to use communication behaviors that were often inefficient. Workers were observed to favor synchronous forms of communication, such as telephone calls and chance face-to-face meetings with colleagues, even when these channels were not effective. Synchronous communication also contributes to a highly interruptive working environment, increasing the potential for clinical errors to be [...]

This paper provides a "viewpoint discussion" based on a presentation made to the 2000 Symposium of the American College of Medical Informatics. It discusses potential opportunities for researchers in health informatics to become involved in the rapidly growing field of bioinformatics, using the activities of the Yale Center for Medical Informatics as a case study. One set of opportunities occurs where bioinformatics research itself intersects with the clinical world. Examples [...]

Currently, when cytopathology images are archived, they are typically stored with a limited text-based description of their content. Such a description inherently fails to quantify the properties of an image and refers to an extremely small fraction of its information content. This paper describes a method for automatically indexing images of individual cells and their associated diagnoses by computationally derived cell descriptors. This methodology may serve to better index data [...]