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To determine whether there are statistically significant differences in the content of electronic mail (e-mail) and conventional mail sent to authors of papers published in medical journals.

The Unified Medical Language System (UMLS) combines many well-established authoritative medical informatics terminologies in one knowledge representation system. Such a resource is very valuable to the health care community and industry. However, the UMLS is very large and complex and poses serious comprehension problems for users and maintenance personnel. The authors present a representation to support the user's comprehension and navigation of the UMLS.

To design a pattern recognition engine based on concepts derived from mammalian immune systems.

Terminology work in nursing has given rise to an increasing number of nursing terminologies. These generally take the form of controlled vocabularies. Because of the limitations of the controlled vocabulary approach, individual terminologies tend to be tuned to meet the specific needs of their intended users. Differences between terminologies are now a significant barrier to the comparison and interchange of health information. To agree on a single, multipurpose terminology would [...]

To develop a guideline document model that includes a sufficiently broad set of concepts to be useful throughout the guideline life cycle.

The entity-attribute-value representation with classes and relationships (EAV/CR) provides a flexible and simple database schema to store heterogeneous biomedical data. In certain circumstances, however, the EAV/CR model is known to retrieve data less efficiently than conventionally based database schemas.

Recent research has studied the communication behaviors of clinical hospital workers and observed a tendency for these workers to use communication behaviors that were often inefficient. Workers were observed to favor synchronous forms of communication, such as telephone calls and chance face-to-face meetings with colleagues, even when these channels were not effective. Synchronous communication also contributes to a highly interruptive working environment, increasing the potential for clinical errors to be [...]

This paper provides a "viewpoint discussion" based on a presentation made to the 2000 Symposium of the American College of Medical Informatics. It discusses potential opportunities for researchers in health informatics to become involved in the rapidly growing field of bioinformatics, using the activities of the Yale Center for Medical Informatics as a case study. One set of opportunities occurs where bioinformatics research itself intersects with the clinical world. Examples [...]