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In public health and health services research, the inclusion of geographic information in data sets is critical. Because of concerns over the re-identification of patients, data from small geographic areas are either suppressed or the geographic areas are aggregated into larger ones. Our objective is to estimate the population size cut-off at which a geographic area is sufficiently large so that no data suppression or further aggregation is necessary.

To measure the uncertainty of temporal assertions like "3 weeks ago" in clinical texts.

The Program Requirements for Fellowship Education identify the knowledge and skills that physicians must master through the course of a training program to be certified in the subspecialty of clinical informatics. They also specify accreditation requirements for clinical informatics training programs. The AMIA Board of Directors approved this document in November 2008.

As the professional home for biomedical and health informaticians, AMIA is actively working to support high quality relevant professional education and research opportunities. This issue of JAMIA presents two key documents that provide tangible evidence of progress on this front. In this editorial, we describe the context and specific purpose of the two documents, how they were developed, and AMIA's plans to build upon the documents.

The active engagement of consumers is an important factor in achieving widespread success of health information systems. The disability community represents a major segment of the healthcare arena, with more than 50 million Americans experiencing some form of disability. In keeping with the "consumer-driven" approach to e-health systems, this paper considers the distinctive aspects of electronic and personal health record use by this segment of society. Drawing upon the information [...]

To test whether the anchoring and order cognitive biases experienced during search by consumers using information retrieval systems can be corrected to improve the accuracy of, and confidence in, answers to health-related questions.

Chemical concepts assigned multiple "Chemical Viewed Structurally" semantic types (STs) in the Unified Medical Language System (UMLS) are subject to ambiguous interpretation. The multiple assignments may denote the fact that a specific represented chemical (combination) is a conjugate, derived via a chemical reaction of chemicals of the different types, or a complex, composed of a mixture of such chemicals. The previously introduced Refined Semantic Network (RSN) is modified to properly [...]

Interface terminologies are designed to support interactions between humans and structured medical information. In particular, many interface terminologies have been developed for structured computer based documentation systems. Experts and policy-makers have recommended that interface terminologies be mapped to reference terminologies. The goal of the current study was to evaluate how well the reference terminology SNOMED CT could map to and represent two interface terminologies, MEDCIN and the Categorical Health Information [...]

Surgical Process Models (SPMs) are models of surgical interventions. The objectives of this study are to validate acquisition methods for Surgical Process Models and to assess the performance of different observer populations.

Health care providers are legally obliged to report cases of specified diseases to public health authorities, but existing manual, provider-initiated reporting systems generally result in incomplete, error-prone, and tardy information flow. Automated laboratory-based reports are more likely accurate and timely, but lack clinical information and treatment details. Here, we describe the Electronic Support for Public Health (ESP) application, a robust, automated, secure, portable public health detection and messaging system for [...]