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Studies have suggested that rural physicians do not use MEDLINE to aid their clinical decision making, and yet rural physicians appear to be a group that would benefit greatly from the use of MEDLINE because of their isolation from libraries and colleagues. This study was undertaken to understand why a population so likely to benefit from the use of MEDLINE is not using it. The study confirmed that rural physicians [...]

To determine the consistency among the practice guidelines of the Dutch College of General Practitioners with respect to the use of blood tests.

Medication errors are common, and while most such errors have little potential for harm they cause substantial extra work in hospitals. A small proportion do have the potential to cause injury, and some cause preventable adverse drug events.

While preference elicitation techniques have been effective in helping patients make decisions consistent with their preferences, little is known about whether information about patient preferences affects clinicians in clinical decision making and improves patient outcomes. The purpose of this study was to evaluate a decision support system for eliciting elderly patients' preferences for self-care capability and providing this information to nurses in clinical practice-specifically, its effect on nurses' care priorities [...]

Controlled medical terminologies (CMTs) have been recognized as important tools in a variety of medical informatics applications, ranging from patient-record systems to decision-support systems. Controlled medical terminologies are typically organized in semantic network structures consisting of tens to hundreds of thousands of concepts. This overwhelming size and complexity can be a serious barrier to their maintenance and widespread utilization. The authors propose the use of object-oriented databases to address the [...]

All articles indexed in MEDLINE or CINAHL, related to the use of computer technology in patient education, and published in peer-reviewed journals between 1971 and 1998 were selected for review. Sixty-six articles, including 21 research-based reports, were identified. Forty-five percent of the studies were related to the management of chronic disease. Thirteen studies described an improvement in knowledge scores or clinical outcomes when computer-based patient education was compared with traditional [...]

Biomedical informatics, imaging, and engineering are major forces driving the knowledge revolutions that are shaping the agendas for biomedical research and clinical medicine in the 21st century. These disciplines produce the tools and techniques to advance biomedical research, and continually feed new technologies and procedures into clinical medicine. To sustain this force, an increased investment is needed in the physics, biomedical science, engineering, mathematics, information science, and computer science undergirding [...]

The Hanshin-Awaji earthquake in January 1995 caused the greatest number of deaths and injuries in Japan since World War II. Various weaknesses of modern information systems were exposed during and after the earthquake. The authors carried out a questionnaire survey to investigate the current state of hospital information and to examine the kinds of information needed immediately after an earthquake. The survey results show that information about the ability to [...]