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In today's environment, providers are extremely time-constrained. Assembling relevant contextual data to make decisions on laboratory results can take a significant amount of time from the day. The Regenstrief Institute has created a system which leverages data within Indiana Health Information Exchange's (IHIE's) repository, the Indiana Network for Patient Care (INPC), to provide well-organized and contextual information on returning laboratory results to outpatient providers. The system described here uses data [...]

Electronic medical records (EMRs) facilitate abnormal test result communication through "alert" notifications. The aim was to evaluate how primary care providers (PCPs) manage alerts related to critical diagnostic test results on their EMR screens, and compare alert-management strategies of providers with high versus low rates of timely follow-up of results.

Although electronic notes have advantages compared to handwritten notes, they take longer to write and promote information redundancy in electronic health records (EHRs). We sought to quantify redundancy in clinical documentation by studying collections of physician notes in an EHR.

Medication information is one of the most important types of clinical data in electronic medical records. It is critical for healthcare safety and quality, as well as for clinical research that uses electronic medical record data. However, medication data are often recorded in clinical notes as free-text. As such, they are not accessible to other computerized applications that rely on coded data. We describe a new natural language processing system [...]

Time-dependent drug-drug interactions (TDDIs) are drug combinations that result in a decreased drug effect due to coadministration of a second drug. Such interactions can be prevented by separately administering the drugs. This study attempted to reduce drug administration errors due to overridden TDDIs in a care provider order entry (CPOE) system. In four periods divided over two studies, logged TDDIs were investigated by reviewing the time intervals prescribed in the [...]

The goal of the study was to develop an in-depth understanding of work practices, workflow, and information flow in chronic disease care, to facilitate development of context-appropriate informatics tools.

This study evaluated the effect of a Computerized Physician Order Entry system with basic Clinical Decision Support (CPOE/CDSS) on the incidence of medication errors (MEs) and preventable adverse drug events (pADEs).

The Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) has a system-wide, patient-centric electronic medical record system (EMR) within which the authors developed the Clinical Case Registries (CCR) to support population-centric delivery and evaluation of VA medical care. To date, the authors have applied the CCR to populations with human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) and hepatitis C virus (HCV). Local components use diagnosis codes and laboratory test results to identify patients who may have [...]

Don E. Detmer has served as President and Chief Executive Officer of the American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA) for the past five years, helping to set a course for the organization and demonstrating remarkable leadership as AMIA has evolved into a vibrant and influential professional association. On the occasion of Dr. Detmer's retirement, we fondly reflect on his professional life and his many contributions to biomedical informatics and, more generally [...]

Previous reviews have examined evidence of the impact of CPOE on medication errors, but have used highly variable definitions of "error". We attempted to answer a very focused question, namely, what evidence exists that CPOE systems reduce prescribing errors among hospital inpatients? We identified 13 papers (reporting 12 studies) published between 1998 and 2007. Nine demonstrated a significant reduction in prescribing error rates for all or some drug types. Few [...]