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Patients, policymakers, providers, payers, employers, and others have increasing interest in using personal health records (PHRs) to improve healthcare costs, quality, and efficiency. While organizations now invest millions of dollars in PHRs, the best PHR architectures, value propositions, and descriptions are not universally agreed upon. Despite widespread interest and activity, little PHR research has been done to date, and targeted research investment in PHRs appears inadequate. The authors reviewed the [...]

In order to assess the mission and strategic direction in an academic department of biomedical informatics, we used social network analysis to identify patterns of common interest among the department's multidisciplinary faculty. Data representing faculty and their self-identified research methods and expertise were analyzed by applying a network modularity algorithm to detect community structure. Three distinct communities of practice emerged: empirical discovery and prediction; human and organizational factors; and information [...]

Development of public health informatics applications often requires the integration of multiple data sources. This process can be challenging due to issues such as different file formats, schemas, naming systems, and having to scrape the content of web pages. A potential solution to these system development challenges is the use of Web 2.0 technologies. In general, Web 2.0 technologies are new internet services that encourage and value information sharing and [...]

In order to evaluate the accuracy of existing EMR data in predicting follow-up providers, a retrospective analysis was performed on six months of data for inpatient and ED encounters occurring at two hospitals, and on related outpatient data. Sensitivity and Positive Predictive Value (PPV) were calculated for each of eight predictors, to determine their effectiveness in predicting follow-up providers. Our findings indicate that access to longitudinal patient care records can [...]

Family health history is a complex, multifaceted tool for assessing disease risk that can offer insight into the interplay between inherited and social factors relevant to patient care. Family health history tools in electronic health records can enable the user to collect, represent, and interpret structured data that properly supports clinical decisions. If these data can be made interoperable, important health information can be shared with minimal duplication of effort [...]

Statistical aberrancy-detection algorithms play a central role in automated public health systems, analyzing large volumes of clinical and administrative data in real-time with the goal of detecting disease outbreaks rapidly and accurately. Not all algorithms perform equally well in terms of sensitivity, specificity, and timeliness in detecting disease outbreaks and the evidence describing the relative performance of different methods is fragmented and mainly qualitative.

Despite recognition that clinical decision support (CDS) can improve patient care, there has been poor penetration of this technology into healthcare settings. We used CDS to increase inpatient influenza vaccination during implementation of an electronic medical record, in which pharmacy and nursing transactions increasingly became electronic. Over three influenza seasons we evaluated standing orders, provider reminders, and pre-selected physician orders. A pre-intervention cross-sectional survey showed that most patients (95%) met [...]

Infobuttons are decision support tools that provide links within electronic medical record systems to relevant content in online information resources. The aim of infobuttons is to help clinicians promptly meet their information needs. The objective of this study was to determine whether infobutton links that direct to specific content topics ("topic links") are more effective than links that point to general overview content ("nonspecific links").

This study investigates the effects of digital image compression on automatic quantification of immunohistochemical nuclear markers. We examined 188 images with a previously validated computer-assisted analysis system. A first group was composed of 47 images captured in TIFF format, and other three contained the same images converted from TIFF to JPEG format with 3x, 23x and 46x compression. Counts of TIFF format images were compared with the other three groups [...]