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The conduct of clinical and translational research regularly involves the use of a variety of heterogeneous and large-scale data resources. Scalable methods for the integrative analysis of such resources, particularly when attempting to leverage computable domain knowledge in order to generate actionable hypotheses in a high-throughput manner, remain an open area of research. In this report, we describe both a generalizable design pattern for such integrative knowledge-anchored hypothesis discovery operations [...]

Telemonitoring interventions featuring transmission of home glucose records to healthcare providers have resulted in improved glycemic control in patients with diabetes. No research has addressed the intensity or duration of telemonitoring required to sustain such improvements.

A system that translates narrative text in the medical domain into structured representation is in great demand. The system performs three sub-tasks: concept extraction, assertion classification, and relation identification.

To assess the impact of a web-based personally controlled health management system (PCHMS) on the uptake of seasonal influenza vaccine and primary care service utilization among university students and staff.

Patient discharge summaries provide detailed medical information about hospitalized patients and are a rich resource of data for clinical record text mining. The textual expressions of this information are highly variable. In order to acquire a precise understanding of the patient, it is important to uncover the relationship between all instances in the text. In natural language processing (NLP), this task falls under the category of coreference resolution.

Pharmacogenomics evaluations of variability in drug metabolic processes may be useful for making individual drug response predictions. We present an approach to deriving 'phenotype scores' based on existing pharmacogenomics knowledge and a patient's genomics data. Pharmacogenomics plays an important role in the bioactivation of tamoxifen, a prodrug administered to patients for breast cancer treatment. Tamoxifen is therefore considered a model for many drugs requiring bioactivation. We investigate whether this knowledge-based [...]

Many patients experience difficulties in adhering to long-term treatment. Although patients' reasons for not being adherent are diverse, one of the most commonly reported barriers is forgetfulness. Reminding patients to take their medication may provide a solution. Electronic reminders (automatically sent reminders without personal contact between the healthcare provider and patient) are now increasingly being used in the effort to improve adherence.

In industries outside healthcare, highly skilled employees enable substantial gains in productivity after adoption of information technologies. The authors explore whether the presence of highly skilled, autonomous clinical support staff is associated with higher performance among physicians with electronic health records (EHRs). Using data from a survey of general internists, the authors assessed whether physicians with EHRs were more likely to be top performers on cost and quality if they [...]

Electronic health records (EHR) have the potential to improve patient care through efficient access to complete patient health information. This potential may not be reached because many of the most important determinants of health outcome are rarely included. Successful health promotion and disease prevention requires patient-reported data reflecting health behaviors and psychosocial issues. Furthermore, there is a need to harmonize this information across different EHR systems.