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To determine the extent to which a combination of existing machine-readable health terminologies cover the concepts and terms needed for a comprehensive controlled vocabulary for health information systems by carrying out a distributed national experiment using the Internet and the UMLS Knowledge Sources, lexical programs, and server.

In mid-1996, the FDA called for discussions on regulation of clinical software programs as medical devices. In response, a consortium of organizations dedicated to improving health care through information technology has developed recommendations for the responsible regulation and monitoring of clinical software systems by users, vendors, and regulatory agencies. Organizations assisting in development of recommendations, or endorsing the consortium position include the American Medical Informatics Association, the Computer-based Patient Record [...]

Telephone-Linked Care (TLC) technology has been developed and applied as an alternative to and a supplement for office visits as a means to deliver ambulatory care. TLC is used to monitor patients with chronic diseases, counsel patients on important health behaviors, and provide information and support to home caregivers of patients with disabling conditions. TLC speaks to patients over the telephone in their homes using computer-controlled digitized human speech. Patients [...]

Data in computer-based patient records (CPRs) have many uses beyond their primary role in patient care, including research and health-system management. Although the accuracy of CPR data directly affects these applications, there has been only sporadic interest in, and no previous review of, data accuracy in CPRs. This paper reviews the published studies of data accuracy in CPRs. These studies report highly variable levels of accuracy. This variability stems from [...]

Objective: To use routine data from a comprehensive electronic medical record system to predict death among patients with reactive airways disease. Design: Retrospective cohort study conducted in an academic primary care internal medicine practice. Subjects were 1,536 adults with reactive airways disease: 542 with asthma and 994 with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD). Measurements: The dependent variable was death from any cause within 3 years following patients' first primary care [...]

As in other areas of society, the Internet and the World Wide Web are becoming important topics in medical informatics. This is evident from the recent American Medical Informatics Association's 1996 Annual Fall Symposium, where the theme was "Beyond the Superhighway: Exploiting the Internet with Medical Informatics." Of the over 330 papers and abstracts published in the Proceedings, one third dealt with the Internet and/or the Web. In some cases [...]

To compare three potential sources of controlled clinical terminology (READ codes version 3.1, SNOMED International, and Unified Medical Language System (UMLS) version 1.6) relative to attributes of completeness, clinical taxonomy, administrative mapping, term definitions and clarity (duplicate coding rate).