Search AMIA.org

To evaluate use of information resources during the first year of IAIMS implementation at the Yale-New Haven Medical Center. The evaluation asked: (1) Which information resources are being used? (2) Who uses information resources? (3) Where are information resources used? (4) Are multiple sources of information being integrated?

New system design and evaluation methodologies are being developed to address social, organizational, political, and other non-technological issues in medical informatics. This paper describes a social interactionist framework for researching these kinds of organizational issues, based on research within medical informatics and other disciplines over the past 20 years. It discusses how effective evaluation strategies may be undertaken to address organizational issues concerning computer information systems in medicine and health [...]

Clinical trials today typically are inefficient, paper-based operations. Poor community physician awareness of available trials and difficult referral mechanisms also contribute to poor accrual. The Physicians Research Network (PRN) web was developed for more efficient trial protocol distribution and eligibility inquiries. The Medical University of South Carolina's Hollings Cancer Center trials program and two community oncology practices served as a testbed. In 581 man-hours over 18 months, 147 protocols were [...]

The Interactive Home Health Care Program is a demonstration project evaluating the use of in-home telemedicine to provide health care for elderly and disabled people. Local cable systems interconnect a base station staffed by a telemedicine nurse with a modified television in the home. Six months into the project, 38 patients are being cared for at three sites in rural Kansas. Individual patient profiles show improvement. Technical and social challenges [...]

Our premise is that from the perspective of maximum flexibility of data usage by computer-based record (CPR) systems, existing nursing classification systems are necessary, but not sufficient, for representing important aspects of "what nurses do." In particular, we have focused our attention on those classification systems that represent nurses' clinical activities through the abstraction of activities into categories of nursing interventions. In this theoretical paper, we argue that taxonomic, combinatorial [...]

Information contained in medical images differs considerably from that residing in alphanumeric format. The difference can be attributed to four characteristics: (1) the semantics of medical knowledge extractable from images is imprecise; (2) image information contains form and spatial data, which are not expressible in conventional language; (3) a large part of image information is geometric; (4) diagnostic inferences derived from images rest on an incomplete, continuously evolving model of [...]

A national public and private "grand challenge" initiative should be undertaken to assure the American public that the telecommunications and computing revolutions improve health care, health education, and biomedical and health services research, and secure accountability for cost, quality, and access. The initiative should focus on meeting the needs of the patient and society at large. It needs to be a national vision, but it also ought to have regional [...]

Good communication is vital in health care, both among health care professionals, and between health care professionals and their patients. And well-written documents, describing and/or explaining the information in structured databases may be easier to comprehend, more edifying, and even more convincing than the structured data, even when presented in tabular or graphic form. Documents may be automatically generated from structured data, using techniques from the field of natural language [...]