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The authors study the extraction of useful phrases from a natural language database by statistical methods. The aim is to leverage human effort by providing preprocessed phrase lists with a high percentage of useful material.

To compare out-of-box performance of three commercially available continuous speech recognition software packages: IBM ViaVoice 98 with General Medicine Vocabulary; Dragon Systems NaturallySpeaking Medical Suite, version 3.0; and L&H Voice Xpress for Medicine, General Medicine Edition, version 1.2.

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 [...]

To measure the strength of agreement between the concepts and records retrieved from a computerized patient database, in response to physician-derived questions, using a semantic terminological model for clinical findings with those concepts and records excerpted clinically by manual identification. The performance of the semantic terminological model is also compared with the more established retrieval methods of free-text search, ICD-10, and hierarchic retrieval.

The task of creating and maintaining a front end to a large institutional entity-attribute-value (EAV) database can be cumbersome when using traditional client-server technology. Switching to Web technology as a delivery vehicle solves some of these problems but introduces others. In particular, Web development environments tend to be primitive, and many features that client-server developers take for granted are missing. WebEAV is a generic framework for Web development that is [...]

The authors have developed a Web-based system that provides summary information about clinical trials being conducted throughout the United States. The first version of the system, publicly available in February 2000, contains more than 4,000 records representing primarily trials sponsored by the National Institutes of Health. The impetus for this system has come from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) Modernization Act of 1997, which mandated a registry of both [...]

While largely ignored in informatics thinking, the clinical communication space accounts for the major part of the information flow in health care. Growing evidence indicates that errors in communication give rise to substantial clinical morbidity and mortality. This paper explores the implications of acknowledging the primacy of the communication space in informatics and explores some solutions to communication difficulties. It also examines whether understanding the dynamics of communication between human [...]

The Internet represents a different type of technology for publishers of scientific, technical, and medical journals. It is not a technology that sustains current markets and creates new efficiencies but is, rather, a disruptive technology that could radically alter market forces, profit expectations, and business models. This paper is a translation and amplification of the research done in this area, applied to a large-circulation new science journal, Pediatrics. The findings [...]

The authors have shown that clinical guidelines embedded in an electronic medical record improved the quality, while lowering the cost, of care for health care workers who incurred occupational exposures to body fluid. They seek to determine whether this system has similar effects on the emergency department care of young children with febrile illness.