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Electronic clinical documentation can be useful for activities such as public health surveillance, quality improvement, and research, but existing methods of de-identification may not provide sufficient protection of patient data. The general-purpose natural language processor MedLEE retains medical concepts while excluding the remaining text so, in addition to processing text into structured data, it may be able provide a secondary benefit of de-identification. Without modifying the system, the authors tested [...]

The Massachusetts eHealth Collaborative (MAeHC) was formed to improve patient safety and quality of care by promoting the use of health information technology through community-based implementation of electronic health records (EHRs) and health information exchange. The Collaborative has recently implemented EHRs in a diverse set of competitively selected communities, encompassing nearly 500 physicians serving over 500,000 patients. Targeting both EHR implementation and health information exchange at the community level has [...]

Retention policies for clinical records are set primarily by the states, although the federal government mandates minimum maintenance periods for certain classes of patients and selected types of information. State policies vary considerably, but most jurisdictions permit many types of data to be destroyed after some period usually shorter than 10 years. Many health care organizations hold records longer than mandated, but over time much clinical data are discarded or [...]

Only half of consultants' medical recommendations are implemented. We created a tool that lets referring providers review and implement electronic recommendations made by consultants, with the hypothesis that facilitation with our tool could improve implementation.

This study sought to assess the value of the Health Level 7/U.S. Food and Drug Administration Structured Product Labeling (SPL) drug knowledge representation standard and its associated terminology sources for drug-intolerance (allergy) decision support in computerized provider order entry (CPOE) systems.

This paper evaluates the retrieval effectiveness of relevance ranking strategies on a collection of 55 queries and about 160,000 MEDLINE((R)) citations used in the 2006 and 2007 Text Retrieval Conference (TREC) Genomics Tracks. The authors study two relevance ranking strategies: term frequency-inverse document frequency (TF-IDF) weighting and sentence-level co-occurrence, and examine their ability to rank retrieved MEDLINE documents given user queries. Furthermore, the authors use the reverse chronological order-PubMed's default [...]

The authors study two approaches to assertion classification. One of these approaches, Extended NegEx (ENegEx), extends the rule-based NegEx algorithm to cover alter-association assertions; the other, Statistical Assertion Classifier (StAC), presents a machine learning solution to assertion classification.

The growing numbers of topically relevant biomedical publications readily available due to advances in document retrieval methods pose a challenge to clinicians practicing evidence-based medicine. It is increasingly time consuming to acquire and critically appraise the available evidence. This problem could be addressed in part if methods were available to automatically recognize rigorous studies immediately applicable in a specific clinical situation. We approach the problem of recognizing studies containing useable [...]

Time-dependent drug-drug interactions (TDDIs) are drug combinations that result in a decreased drug effect due to coadministration of a second drug. Such interactions can be prevented by separately administering the drugs. This study attempted to reduce drug administration errors due to overridden TDDIs in a care provider order entry (CPOE) system. In four periods divided over two studies, logged TDDIs were investigated by reviewing the time intervals prescribed in the [...]

The goal of the study was to develop an in-depth understanding of work practices, workflow, and information flow in chronic disease care, to facilitate development of context-appropriate informatics tools.