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The American College of Medical Informatics is an honorary society established to recognize those who have made sustained contributions to the field. Its highest award, for lifetime achievement and contributions to the discipline of medical informatics, is the Morris F Collen Award. Dr Collen's own efforts as a pioneer in the field stand out as the embodiment of creativity, intellectual rigor, perseverance, and personal integrity. The Collen Award, given once [...]

Well-trained people are urgently needed to tackle global health challenges through information and communication technologies. In this report, AMAUTA, a joint international collaborative training program between the Universidad Peruana Cayetano Heredia and the University of Washington, which has been training Peruvian health professionals in biomedical and health informatics since 1999, is described. Four short-term courses have been organized in Lima, offering training to more than 200 graduate-level students. Long-term training [...]

Health IT implementations often introduce radical changes to clinical work processes and workflow. Prior research investigating this effect has shown conflicting results. Recent time and motion studies have consistently found that this impact is negligible; whereas qualitative studies have repeatedly revealed negative end-user perceptions suggesting decreased efficiency and disrupted workflow. We speculate that this discrepancy may be due in part to the design of the time and motion studies, which [...]

To classify automatically lung tumor-node-metastases (TNM) cancer stages from free-text pathology reports using symbolic rule-based classification.

Physician practices may adopt and use electronic prescribing (eRx) in response to mandates, incentives, and perceived value of the technology. Yet, for the most part, diffusion has been limited and geographically confined, and even when adopted, use of eRx in many practices has been low. One explanation for this phenomenon is that decision-makers in the practices possess different technological viewpoints (frames) related to eRx and these frames have formed the [...]

Studies that have looked at the effectiveness of computerized decision support systems to prevent drug-drug interactions have reported modest results because of low response by the providers to the automated alerts.

To examine the effects of a computer-assisted, interactive tailored patient assessment (ITPA) tool in oncology practice on: documented patient care, symptom distress, and patients' need for symptom management support during treatment and rehabilitation.

Colorectal cancer (CRC) screening rates are low despite confirmed benefits. The authors investigated the use of natural language processing (NLP) to identify previous colonoscopy screening in electronic records from a random sample of 200 patients at least 50 years old. The authors developed algorithms to recognize temporal expressions and 'status indicators', such as 'patient refused', or 'test scheduled'. The new methods were added to the existing KnowledgeMap concept identifier system [...]

The English version of the online encyclopedia, Wikipedia, has been recently reported to be the prominent source of online health information. However, there is little information concerning the quality of information found in Wikipedia. Therefore, we created a questionnaire asking for scope, completeness, and accuracy of information found on osteosarcoma. Three independent observers tested the English version of Wikipedia, as well as the patient version and the health professional version [...]