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Family history information has emerged as an increasingly important tool for clinical care and research. While recent standards provide for structured entry of family history, many clinicians record family history data in text. The authors sought to characterize family history information within clinical documents to assess the adequacy of existing models and create a more comprehensive model for its representation. Models were evaluated on 100 documents containing 238 sentences and [...]

De-identified clinical data in standardized form (eg, diagnosis codes), derived from electronic medical records, are increasingly combined with research data (eg, DNA sequences) and disseminated to enable scientific investigations. This study examines whether released data can be linked with identified clinical records that are accessible via various resources to jeopardize patients' anonymity, and the ability of popular privacy protection methodologies to prevent such an attack.

Lack of dose adjustment for renally cleared drugs in the presence of poor renal function is a common problem in the hospital setting. The absence of a clinical decision support system (CDSS) from direct clinician workflows such as computerized provider order entry (CPOE) hinders the uptake of CDSS. This study implemented CDSS in an environment independent of CPOE, introduced to prescribers via academic detailing, to address the dosing of renally [...]

The nationwide health information network (NHIN) has been proposed to securely link community and state health information exchange (HIE) entities to create a national, interoperable network for sharing healthcare data in the USA. This paper describes a framework for evaluating the costs, effort, and value of nationwide data exchange as the NHIN moves toward a production state. The paper further presents the results of an initial assessment of the framework [...]

The logical observation identifiers names and codes (LOINC) database contains 55 000 terms consisting of more atomic components called parts. LOINC carries more than 18 000 distinct parts. It is necessary to have definitions/descriptions for each of these parts to assist users in mapping local laboratory codes to LOINC. It is believed that much of this information can be obtained from the internet; the first effort was with Wikipedia. This [...]

The objective of this review was to describe methods used to study and model workflow. The authors included studies set in a variety of industries using qualitative, quantitative and mixed methods. Of the 6221 matching abstracts, 127 articles were included in the final corpus. The authors collected data from each article on researcher perspective, study type, methods type, specific methods, approaches to evaluating quality of results, definition of workflow and [...]

The objective of this study was to develop and validate an automated acquisition system to assess quality of care (QC) measures for cardiovascular diseases. This system combining searching and retrieval algorithms was designed to extract QC measures from electronic discharge notes and to estimate the attainment rates to the current standards of care. It was developed on the patients with ST-segment elevation myocardial infarction and tested on the patients with [...]

MetaMap is a widely available program providing access to the concepts in the unified medical language system (UMLS) Metathesaurus from biomedical text. This study reports on MetaMap's evolution over more than a decade, concentrating on those features arising out of the research needs of the biomedical informatics community both within and outside of the National Library of Medicine. Such features include the detection of author-defined acronyms/abbreviations, the ability to browse [...]

This pilot study explores the impact of a health topics overview (HTO) on reading comprehension. The HTO is generated automatically based on the presence of Unified Medical Language System terms. In a controlled setting, we presented health texts and posed 15 questions for each. We compared performance with and without the HTO. The answers were available in the text, but not always in the HTO. Our study (n=48) showed that [...]

To study the effects of using a population-based informatics system for osteoporosis screening and treatment in women aged 65 years or older.