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At present, most clinical data are exchanged between organizations within a regional system. However, people traveling abroad may need to visit a hospital, which would make international exchange of clinical data very useful.

Prescription drugs can be associated with adverse effects (AEs) that are unrecognized despite evidence in the medical literature, as shown by rofecoxib's late recall in 2004. We assessed whether applying information mining to PubMed could reveal major drug-AE associations if articles testing whether drugs cause AEs are over-represented in the literature.

Federal legislation (Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health (HITECH) Act) has provided funds to support an unprecedented increase in health information technology (HIT) adoption for healthcare provider organizations and professionals throughout the U.S. While recognizing the promise that widespread HIT adoption and meaningful use can bring to efforts to improve the quality, safety, and efficiency of healthcare, the American Medical Informatics Association devoted its 2009 Annual Health Policy [...]

Informatics applications have the potential to improve participation in clinical trials, but their design must be based on user-centered research. This research used a fully counterbalanced experimental design to investigate the effect of changes made to the original version of a website, http://BreastCancerTrials.org/, and confirm that the revised version addressed and reinforced patients' needs and expectations.

Healthcare organizations must de-identify patient records before sharing data. Many organizations rely on the Safe Harbor Standard of the HIPAA Privacy Rule, which enumerates 18 identifiers that must be suppressed (eg, ages over 89). An alternative model in the Privacy Rule, known as the Statistical Standard, can facilitate the sharing of more detailed data, but is rarely applied because of a lack of published methodologies. The authors propose an intuitive [...]

Over the last four decades, the UK has made large investments in healthcare information technology. The authors conducted interviews and reviewed published and unpublished documents to describe national-scale clinical information exchange in England, how it was achieved, and the problems experienced that the USA might avoid. Clinical information exchange in the UK was accomplished by establishing a foundation of policy, infrastructure, and systems of care, by creating and acquiring clinical [...]