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The purpose of the study is to determine how frequently critical laboratory results (CLRs) occur and how rapidly they are acted upon. A CLR was defined as a result that met either the critical reporting criteria used by the laboratory at Brigham and Women's Hospital or other, more complex criteria.

Guidelines regarding patient-provider electronic mail are presented. The intent is to provide guidance concerning computer-based communications between clinicians and patients within a contractual relationship in which the health-care provider has taken on an explicit measure of responsibility for the client's care. The guidelines address two interrelated aspects: effective interaction between the clinician and patient, and observance of medicolegal prudence. Recommendations for site-specific policy formulation are included.

A primary goal of the University of Pittsburgh's 1990-94 UMLS-sponsored effort was to develop and evaluate PostDoc (a lexical indexing system) and Pindex (a statistical indexing system) comparatively, and then in combination as a hybrid system. Each system takes as input a portion of the free text from a narrative part of a patient's electronic medical record and returns a list of suggested MeSH terms to use in formulating a [...]

The National Library of Medicine's (NLM) Unified Medical Language System (UMLS) includes a Metathesaurus (Meta), which is a compilation of medical terms drawn from over 30 controlled vocabularies, and a Semantic Net, which contains the semantic types used to categorize Meta concepts and the semantic relations to connect them. Meta has been constructed through lexical matching techniques and human review. The purpose of this study was to audit the Meta [...]

The "guidelines movement" was formed to reduce variability in practice, control costs, and improve patient care outcomes. Yet the overall impact on practice and outcomes has been disappointing. Evidence demonstrates that the most effective method of stimulating awareness of and compliance with best practices is computer-generated reminders provided at the point of care. This paper reviews five steps along the path from the development of a guideline to its integration [...]

The goal of the project was to create recommendations and design specifications for a multimedia tool to enhance the informed consent process for clinical trials. The authors focused on the needs of patients with potential cognitive impairment.

To evaluate a "lexically assign, logically refine" (LALR) strategy for merging overlapping healthcare terminologies. This strategy combines description logic classification with lexical techniques that propose initial term definitions. The lexically suggested initial definitions are manually refined by domain experts to yield description logic definitions for each term in the overlapping terminologies of interest. Logic-based techniques are then used to merge defined terms.

To investigate factors that determine the feasibility and effectiveness of a critiquing system for asthma/COPD that will be integrated with a general practitioner's (GP's) information system.

To examine the capability of a new object-oriented method called Tabular Application Development (TAD) in developing a hospital information system for a gastroenterology clinic.