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To characterise empirical instances of Unified Medical Language System (UMLS) Metathesaurus term strings in a large clinical corpus, and to illustrate what types of term characteristics are generalisable across data sources.

Clinical integrated data repositories (IDRs) are poised to become a foundational element of biomedical and translational research by providing the coordinated data sources necessary to conduct retrospective analytic research and to identify and recruit prospective research subjects. The Clinical and Translational Science Award (CTSA) consortium's Informatics IDR Group conducted a survey of 2010 consortium members to evaluate recent trends in IDR implementation and use to support research between 2008 and [...]

The Massachusetts Veterans Epidemiology Research and Information Center in collaboration with the Stanford Center for Innovative Study Design set out to test the feasibility of a new method of evidence generation. The first pilot of a point-of-care clinical trial (POCCT), adding randomization and other study processes to an electronic medical record (EMR) system, was launched to compare the effectiveness of two insulin regimens.

To explore the feasibility of using statistical text classification to automatically detect extreme-risk events in clinical incident reports.

Adverse drug reaction (ADR) is one of the major causes of failure in drug development. Severe ADRs that go undetected until the post-marketing phase of a drug often lead to patient morbidity. Accurate prediction of potential ADRs is required in the entire life cycle of a drug, including early stages of drug design, different phases of clinical trials, and post-marketing surveillance.

National organizations historically focused on increasing use of effective services are now attempting to identify and discourage use of low-value services. Electronic health records (EHRs) could be used to measure use of low-value services, but few studies have examined this. The aim of the study was to: (1) determine if EHR data can be used to identify women eligible for an extended Pap testing interval; (2) determine the proportion of [...]

Systematic approaches to dealing with missing values in record linkage are still lacking. This article compares the ad-hoc treatment of unknown comparison values as 'unequal' with other and more sophisticated approaches. An empirical evaluation was conducted of the methods on real-world data as well as on simulated data based on them.

Although the penetration of electronic health records is increasing rapidly, much of the historical medical record is only available in handwritten notes and forms, which require labor-intensive, human chart abstraction for some clinical research. The few previous studies on automated extraction of data from these handwritten notes have focused on monolithic, custom-developed recognition systems or third-party systems that require proprietary forms.

Many aberration detection algorithms are used in infectious disease surveillance systems to assist in the early detection of potential outbreaks. In this study, we explored a novel approach to adjusting aberration detection algorithms to account for the impact of seasonality inherent in some surveillance data. By using surveillance data for hand-foot-and-mouth disease in Shandong province, China, we evaluated the use of seasonally-adjusted alerting thresholds with three aberration detection methods (C1 [...]

Standard written methods of presenting research information may be difficult for many parents and children to understand. This pilot study was designed to examine the use of a novel prototype interactive consent program for describing a hypothetical pediatric asthma trial to parents and children. Parents and children were interviewed to examine their baseline understanding of key elements of a clinical trial, eg, randomization, placebo, and blinding. Subjects then reviewed age-appropriate [...]