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To provide a legal and ethical analysis of some of the implementation challenges faced by the Population Therapeutics Research Group (PTRG) at Memorial University (Canada), in using genealogical information offered by individuals for its genetics research database.

Breakthroughs in molecular profiling technologies are enabling a new data-intensive approach to biomedical research, with the potential to revolutionize how we study, manage, and treat complex diseases. The next great challenge for clinical applications of these innovations will be to create scalable computational solutions for intelligently linking complex biomedical patient data to clinically actionable knowledge. Traditional database management systems (DBMS) are not well suited to representing complex syntactic and semantic [...]

Integration of patients' records across resources enhances analytics. To address privacy concerns, emerging strategies such as Bloom filter encodings (BFEs), enable integration while obscuring identifiers. However, recent investigations demonstrate BFEs are, in theory, vulnerable to cryptanalysis when encoded identifiers are randomly selected from a public resource. This study investigates the extent to which cryptanalysis conditions hold for (1) real patient records and (2) a countermeasure that obscures the frequencies of [...]

Significant limitations exist in the timely and complete identification of primary and recurrent cancers for clinical and epidemiologic research. A SAS-based coding, extraction, and nomenclature tool (SCENT) was developed to address this problem.

Healthcare organizations continue to adopt information technologies with clinical decision support (CDS) to prevent potential medication-related adverse drug events. End-users who are unfamiliar with certain high-risk patient populations are at an increased risk of unknowingly causing medication errors. The following case describes a heart transplant recipient exposed to supra-therapeutic concentrations of tacrolimus during co-administration of ritonavir as a result of vendor supplied CDS tools that omitted an interaction alert. After [...]

To determine what, if any, opportunity exists in using administrative medical claims data for supplemental reporting to the state infectious disease registry system.

Logical Observation Identifiers Names and Codes (LOINC) mapping of laboratory data is often a question of the effort of mapping compared with the benefits of the structure achieved. The new LOINC mapping assistant RELMA (version 2011) has the potential to reduce the effort required for semi-automated mapping. We examined quality, time effort, and sustainability of such mapping.

This paper presents a coreference resolution system for clinical narratives. Coreference resolution aims at clustering all mentions in a single document to coherent entities.

The literature describes teenagers as active users of social media, who seem to care about privacy, but who also reveal a considerable amount of personal information. There have been no studies of how they manage personal health information on social media.

Underage alcohol use is the leading cause of preventable mortality among adolescents in the USA. Moreover, the average age of onset of underage drinking is 13 years. This study examined the feasibility of using a text messaging survey (TMS) to assess adolescent alcohol use. A sample of 29 adolescents, aged 13-17 years, was recruited from two primary care clinics. They completed a 16 question TMS while in the waiting room [...]