Search AMIA.org

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 [...]

The Massachusetts eHealth Collaborative (MAeHC) was formed to improve patient safety and quality of care by promoting the use of health information technology through community-based implementation of electronic health records (EHRs) and health information exchange. The Collaborative has recently implemented EHRs in a diverse set of competitively selected communities, encompassing nearly 500 physicians serving over 500,000 patients. Targeting both EHR implementation and health information exchange at the community level has [...]

The authors study two approaches to assertion classification. One of these approaches, Extended NegEx (ENegEx), extends the rule-based NegEx algorithm to cover alter-association assertions; the other, Statistical Assertion Classifier (StAC), presents a machine learning solution to assertion classification.

The purpose of this study is to reassess the projected rate of Electronic Health Record (EHR) diffusion and examine how the federal government's efforts to promote the use of EHR technology have influenced physicians' willingness to adopt such systems. The study recreates and extends the analyses conducted by Ford et al. (1) The two periods examined come before and after the U.S. Federal Government's concerted activity to promote EHR adoption.

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 [...]

To effectively meet clinician information needs at the point of care, we must understand how their needs are dependent on both context and clinician type. The Infobutton Manager (IM), accessed through a clinical information system, anticipates the clinician's questions and provides links to pertinent electronic resources. We conducted an observational usefulness case study of medical residents (MDs), nurse practitioners (NPs), registered nurses (RNs), and a physician assistant (PA), using the [...]

Personal health records (PHR) are a modern health technology with the ability to engage patients more fully in their healthcare. Despite widespread interest, there has been little discussion around PHR governance at an organizational level. We develop a governance model and compare it to the practices of some of the early PHR adopters, including hospitals and ambulatory care settings, insurers and health plans, government departments, and commercial sectors. Decision-making structures [...]

Retention policies for clinical records are set primarily by the states, although the federal government mandates minimum maintenance periods for certain classes of patients and selected types of information. State policies vary considerably, but most jurisdictions permit many types of data to be destroyed after some period usually shorter than 10 years. Many health care organizations hold records longer than mandated, but over time much clinical data are discarded or [...]

This paper evaluates the retrieval effectiveness of relevance ranking strategies on a collection of 55 queries and about 160,000 MEDLINE((R)) citations used in the 2006 and 2007 Text Retrieval Conference (TREC) Genomics Tracks. The authors study two relevance ranking strategies: term frequency-inverse document frequency (TF-IDF) weighting and sentence-level co-occurrence, and examine their ability to rank retrieved MEDLINE documents given user queries. Furthermore, the authors use the reverse chronological order-PubMed's default [...]