Search AMIA.org

Clinical informatics intervention research suffers from a lack of attention to external validity in study design, implementation, evaluation, and reporting. This hampers the ability of others to assess the fit of a clinical informatics intervention with demonstrated efficacy in one setting for implementation in their setting. The objective of this model formulation paper is to demonstrate the applicability of the RE-AIM (Reach, Effectiveness, Adoption, Implementation, and Maintenance) framework with proposed [...]

The AMPATH program is a leading initiative in rural Kenya providing healthcare services to combat HIV. Malnutrition and food insecurity are common among AMPATH patients and the Nutritional Information System (NIS) was designed, with cross-functional collaboration between engineering and medical communities, as a comprehensive electronic system to record and assist in effective food distribution in a region with poor infrastructure.

To devise an automated approach for integrating federated database information using database ontologies constructed from their extended metadata.

Technology has great potential to reduce medication errors in hospitals. This case report describes barriers to, and facilitators of, the implementation of a pharmacy bar code scanning system to reduce medication dispensing errors at a large academic medical center. Ten pharmacy staff were interviewed about their experiences during the implementation. Interview notes were iteratively reviewed to identify common themes. The authors identified three main barriers to pharmacy bar code scanning [...]

Patient portals may improve pediatric chronic disease outcomes, but few have been rigorously evaluated for usability by parents. Using scenario-based testing with think-aloud protocols, we evaluated the usability of portals for parents of children with cystic fibrosis, diabetes or arthritis. DESIGN Sixteen parents used a prototype and test data to complete 14 tasks followed by a validated satisfaction questionnaire. Three iterations of the prototype were used.

To incorporate value-based weight scaling into the Fellegi-Sunter (F-S) maximum likelihood linkage algorithm and evaluate the performance of the modified algorithm. Background Because healthcare data are fragmented across many healthcare systems, record linkage is a key component of fully functional health information exchanges. Probabilistic linkage methods produce more accurate, dynamic, and robust matching results than rule-based approaches, particularly when matching patient records that lack unique identifiers. Theoretically, the relative frequency [...]

OBJECTIVE To facilitate patient handoffs between physicians, the computerized patient handoff tool (PHT) extracts information from the electronic health record to populate a form that is printed and given to the cross-cover physician. OBJECTIVES were to: (1) evaluate the rate at which data elements of interest were extracted from the electronic health record into the PHT, (2) assess the frequency for needing information beyond that contained in the PHT and [...]

OBJECTIVE To determine whether a computerized clinical decision support system providing patient-specific recommendations in real-time improves the quality of prescribing for long-term care residents with renal insufficiency. DESIGN Randomized trial within the long-stay units of a large long-term care facility. Randomization was within blocks by unit type. Alerts related to medication prescribing for residents with renal insufficiency were displayed to prescribers in the intervention units and hidden but tracked in [...]

OBJECTIVE Evaluate the effectiveness of a simple rule-based approach in classifying medical discharge summaries according to indicators for obesity and 15 associated co-morbidities as part of the 2008 i2b2 Obesity Challenge. METHODS The authors applied a rule-based approach that looked for occurrences of morbidity-related keywords and identified the types of assertions in which those keywords occurred. The documents were then classified using a simple scoring algorithm based on a mapping [...]