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Unstructured electronic information sources, such as news reports, are proving to be valuable inputs for public health surveillance. However, staying abreast of current disease outbreaks requires scouring a continually growing number of disparate news sources and alert services, resulting in information overload. Our objective is to address this challenge through the HealthMap.org Web application, an automated system for querying, filtering, integrating and visualizing unstructured reports on disease outbreaks.

Monitoring vital signs and locations of certain classes of ambulatory patients can be useful in overcrowded emergency departments and at disaster scenes, both on-site and during transportation. To be useful, such monitoring needs to be portable and low cost, and have minimal adverse impact on emergency personnel, e.g., by not raising an excessive number of alarms. The SMART (Scalable Medical Alert Response Technology) system integrates wireless patient monitoring (ECG, SpO(2)) [...]

This study sought to explore the relationship of workarounds related to the implementation of an electronic medication administration record and medication safety practices in five Midwestern nursing homes.

The authors organized a Natural Language Processing (NLP) challenge on automatically determining the smoking status of patients from information found in their discharge records. This challenge was issued as a part of the i2b2 (Informatics for Integrating Biology to the Bedside) project, to survey, facilitate, and examine studies in medical language understanding for clinical narratives. This article describes the smoking challenge, details the data and the annotation process, explains the [...]

We describe the architecture of LifeCode (A-Life Medical, Inc.), a natural language processing system for free-text clinical information extraction, our methodology in applying LifeCode to the i2b2 smoking challenge, and statistical measures for performance evaluation. Due to the limited test size and the coefficient of variation in the test standard, it is difficult to draw conclusions regarding the relative efficacy of approaches that were applied to this challenge.

Advances in information technology (IT) enable a fundamental redesign of health care processes based on the use and integration of electronic communication at all levels. New communication technologies can support a transition from institution centric to patient-centric applications. This white paper defines key principles and challenges for designers, policy makers, and evaluators of patient-centered technologies for disease management and prevention. It reviews current and emerging trends; highlights challenges related to [...]

We designed the Pre-Admission Medication List (PAML) Builder medication reconciliation application and implemented it at two academic hospitals. We asked 1,714 users to complete a survey of their satisfaction with the application and analyzed factors associated with user efficiency. The survey was completed by 626 (36.5%) users. Most (64%) responders agreed that medication reconciliation improves patient care. Improvement requests included better medication information sources and propagation of medication information to [...]

Despite the proliferation of consumer health sites, lay individuals often experience difficulty finding health information online. The present study attempts to understand users' information seeking difficulties by drawing on a hypothesis testing explanatory framework. It also addresses the role of user competencies and their interaction with internet resources.

Shortcomings surrounding the care of patients with diabetes have been attributed largely to a fragmented, disorganized, and duplicative health care system that focuses more on acute conditions and complications than on managing chronic disease. To address these shortcomings, we developed a diabetes registry population management application to change the way our staff manages patients with diabetes. Use of this new application has helped us coordinate the responsibilities for intervening and [...]