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Qualitative studies can help us understand the "successes" and "failures" of telemedicine to normalize within clinical service provision. This report presents the development of a robust conceptual model of normalization processes in the implementation and development of telemedicine services.

Few previous studies evaluating the benefits of diagnostic decision support systems have simultaneously measured changes in diagnostic quality and clinical management prompted by use of the system. This report describes a reliable and valid scoring technique to measure the quality of clinical decision plans in an acute medical setting, where diagnostic decision support tools might prove most useful.

More than 20% of approximately 35,000 patients filling a diuretic prescription had no potassium blood test recorded within the previous year. A laboratory reporting system used throughout Israel by Maccabi Healthcare Services physicians was modified to provide physician alerts regarding potassium testing. The physicians were experienced users of a computerized medical record (CMR) that provided online laboratory test results. A nightly batch file checked pharmacy diuretic purchases against the patient's [...]

To determine whether sales of electrolyte products contain a signal of outbreaks of respiratory and diarrheal disease in children and, if so, how much earlier a signal relative to hospital diagnoses.

It is not automatically given that the paper-based medical record can be eliminated after the introduction of an electronic medical record (EMR) in a hospital. Many keep and update the paper-based counterpart, and this limits the use of the EMR system. The authors have evaluated the physicians' clinical work practices and attitudes toward a system in a hospital that has eliminated the paper-based counterpart using scanning technology.

Despite the advantages of structured data entry, much of the patient record is still stored as unstructured or semistructured narrative text. The issue of representing clinical document content remains problematic. The authors' prior work using an automated UMLS document indexing system has been encouraging but has been affected by the generally low indexing precision of such systems. In an effort to improve precision, the authors have developed a context-sensitive document [...]

This report describes the design and evaluation of a software application to help carers cope when faced with caring problems and emergencies.

Peer-reviewed publication of scientific research results represents the most important means of their communication. The authors have annually reviewed a large heterogeneous set of papers to produce the International Medical Informatics Association (IMIA) Yearbook of Medical Informatics. To support an objective and high-quality review process, the authors attempted to provide reviewers with a set of refined quality criteria, comprised of 80 general criteria and an additional 60 criteria for specific [...]

With the introduction of ICD-10 as the standard for diagnostics, it becomes necessary to develop an electronic representation of its complete content, inherent semantics, and coding rules. The authors' design relates to the current efforts by the CEN/TC 251 to establish a European standard for hierarchical classification systems in health care. The authors have developed an electronic representation of ICD-10 with the eXtensible Markup Language (XML) that facilitates integration into [...]