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Synthesizing the state of the art from the published literature, this review assesses the basis for employing the Internet to support the information needs of primary care. The authors survey what has been published about the information needs of clinical practice, including primary care, and discuss currently available information resources potentially relevant to primary care. Potential methods of linking information needs with appropriate information resources are described in the context [...]

By the year 2008, a major reorganization of health care services in the United States will have evolved from the solo- and group-practice models of the 1940s, with fee-for-service and insurer-indemnification financing and paper-based information systems, to nationwide managed care plans employing enhanced computer-based information systems.

The approach taken by the Unified Medical Language System (UMLS), in which disparate terminology systems are integrated, has allowed construction of an electronic thesaurus (the Metathesaurus) that avoids imposing any restrictions upon the content, structure, or semantics of the source terminologies. As such, the UMLS has served as a unifying paradigm by providing appropriate links among equivalent entities that are used in different contexts or for different purposes. It accordingly [...]

In 1986, the National Library of Medicine (NLM) assembled a large multidisciplinary, multisite team to work on the Unified Medical Language System (UMLS), a collaborative research project aimed at reducing fundamental barriers to the application of computers to medicine. Beyond its tangible products, the UMLS Knowledge Sources, and its influence on the field of informatics, the UMLS project is an interesting case study in collaborative research and development. It illustrates [...]

Using electronic rather than paper-based record systems improves clinicians' information retrieval from patient narratives. However, few studies address how data should be organized for this purpose. Information retrieval from clinical narratives containing free text involves two steps: searching for a labeled segment and reading its content. The authors hypothesized that physicians can retrieve information better when clinical narratives are divided into many small, labeled segments ("high granularity").

To understand and address patients' need for information surrounding ambulatory-care visits.

Vancomycin-resistant enterococci represent an increasingly important cause of nosocomial infections. Minimizing vancomycin use represents a key strategy in preventing the spread of these infections.

To measure the effect of computer-based outpatient prescription writing by internal medicine physicians on pharmacist work patterns.