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Results of the Austrian MOBITEL (MOBIle phone based TELemonitoring for heart failure patients) trial indicate that home-based telemonitoring improves outcome of chronic heart failure (CHF) patients and reduces both frequency and duration of hospitalizations. Based on lessons learned, we assessed the weak points to clear the way for routine operations.

We present a model of applied clinical informatics in the context of medical informatics in general, across the domain of health sciences and the continuum of information technology development and its adoption into workflow. The distinct challenges of applied clinical informatics present an opportunity to improve efforts through collaboration of the growing number of physicians, health institutional leaders and other health workers in successfully implementing working systems. This journal will [...]

Health literacy is critical for understanding complex medical problems and necessary for the well being of the patient. Printed educational materials (PM) have limitations in explaining the dynamics of a disease process. Multimedia formats may be useful for enhancing the educational process.

Web 2.0 technologies, known as social media, social technologies or Web 2.0, have emerged into the mainstream. As they grow, these new technologies have the opportunity to influence the methods and procedures of many fields. This paper focuses on the clinical implications of the growing Web 2.0 technologies. Five developing trends are explored: information channels, augmented reality, location-based mobile social computing, virtual worlds and serious gaming, and collaborative research networks [...]

Clinical decision support that provides enhanced patient safety at the point of care frequently encounters significant pushback from clinicians who find the process intrusive or time-consuming. We present a hypothetical medical center's dilemma about its allergy alerting system and discuss similar problems faced by real hospitals. We then share some lessons learned and best practices for institutions who wish to implement these tools themselves.

The use of computerized provider order entry (CPOE) has been widely linked to improvements in patient safety. We hypothesized that electronic routing of CPOE-generated orders through individual pagers would improve the efficiency of STAT radiographic studies and respiratory treatments.

Within health and health care, medical informatics and its subspecialties of biomedical, clinical, and public health informatics have emerged as a new discipline with increasing demands for its own work force. Knowledge and skills in medical informatics are widely acknowledged as crucial to future success in patient care, research relating to biomedicine, clinical care, and public health, as well as health policy design. The maturity of the domain and the [...]

OBJECTIVE: Rigorous human-computer interaction (HCI) design methodologies have not traditionally been applied to the development of clinical trial participant tracking (CTPT) tools. Given the frequent us of iconic HCI models in CTPTs, and prior evidence of usability problems associated with the use of ambiguous icons in complex interfaces, such approaches may be problematic. Presentation Discovery (PD), a knowledge-anchored HCI design method, has been previously demonstrated to improve the design of [...]

BACKGROUND: Many natural phenomena demonstrate power-law distributions, where very common items predominate. Problems, medications and lab results represent some of the most important data elements in medicine, but their overall distribution has not been reported. OBJECTIVE: Our objective is to determine whether problems, medications and lab results demonstrate a power law distribution. METHODS: Retrospective review of electronic medical record data for 100,000 randomly selected patients seen at least twice in [...]