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DNA samples are often processed and sequenced in facilities external to the point of collection. These samples are routinely labeled with patient identifiers or pseudonyms, allowing for potential linkage to identity and private clinical information if intercepted during transmission. We present a cryptographic scheme to securely transmit externally generated sequence data which does not require any patient identifiers, public key infrastructure, or the transmission of passwords.

In 2011, the US Supreme Court decided Sorrell v. IMS Health, Inc., a case that addressed the mining of large aggregated databases and the sale of prescriber data for marketing prescription drugs. The court struck down a Vermont law that required data mining companies to obtain permission from individual providers before selling prescription records that included identifiable physician prescription information to pharmaceutical companies for drug marketing. The decision was based [...]

Word sense disambiguation (WSD) methods automatically assign an unambiguous concept to an ambiguous term based on context, and are important to many text-processing tasks. In this study we developed and evaluated a knowledge-based WSD method that uses semantic similarity measures derived from the Unified Medical Language System (UMLS) and evaluated the contribution of WSD to clinical text classification.

It has been claimed that most research findings are false, and it is known that large-scale studies involving omics data are especially prone to errors in design, execution, and analysis. The situation is alarming because taxpayer dollars fund a substantial amount of biomedical research, and because the publication of a research article that is later determined to be flawed can erode the credibility of an entire field, resulting in a [...]

The objective of this paper is to introduce a new language called ccML, designed to provide convenient pragmatic information to applications using the ISO/EN13606 reference model (RM), such as electronic health record (EHR) extracts editors. EHR extracts are presently built using the syntactic and semantic information provided in the RM and constrained by archetypes. The ccML extra information enables the automation of the medico-legal context information edition, which is over [...]

Many methods have been developed to identify disease genes and further module biomarkers of complex diseases based on gene expression data. It is generally difficult to distinguish whether the variations in gene expression are causative or merely the effect of a disease. The limitation of relying on gene expression data alone highlights the need to develop new approaches that can explore various data to reflect the casual relationship between network [...]

Securing protected health information is a critical responsibility of every healthcare organization. We explore information security practices and identify practice patterns that are associated with improved regulatory compliance.

We explored two strategies for query expansion utilizing medical subject headings (MeSH) ontology to improve the effectiveness of medical image retrieval systems. In order to achieve greater effectiveness in the expansion, the search text was analyzed to identify which terms were most amenable to being expanded.

Patient-provider relationships influence diabetes care; less is known about their impact on online patient portal use. Diabetes patients rated provider communication and trust. In this study, we linked responses to electronic medical record data on being a registered portal user and using secure messaging (SM). We specified regression models to evaluate main effects on portal use, and subgroup analyses by race/ethnicity and age. 52% of subjects were registered users; among [...]

Applying the science of networks to quantify the discriminatory impact of the ICD-9-CM to ICD-10-CM transition between clinical specialties.