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Given the need for continuing education in medical informatics for mid-career professionals, the authors aimed to implement and evaluate distance learning courses in this area.

The use of clinical decision support systems to facilitate the practice of evidence-based medicine promises to substantially improve health care quality.

Planning the clinical evaluation of a computerized decision support system requires a strategy that encompasses the different aspects of the clinical problem, the technical difficulties of software and hardware integration and implementation, the behavioral aspects of the targeted users, and the discipline of study design. Although clinical information systems are becoming more widely available, only a few decision support systems have been formally evaluated in clinical environments. Published accounts of [...]

The authors describe and illustrate an integrated trio of software programs for carrying out surface-based analyses of cerebral cortex. The first component of this trio, SureFit (Surface Reconstruction by Filtering and Intensity Transformations), is used primarily for cortical segmentation, volume visualization, surface generation, and the mapping of functional neuroimaging data onto surfaces. The second component, Caret (Computerized Anatomical Reconstruction and Editing Tool Kit), provides a wide range of surface visualization [...]

The Computerized Patient Record System is deployed at all 173 Veterans Affairs (VA) medical centers. Providers access clinical notes in the system from a note title menu. Following its implementation at the Nashville VA Medical Center, users expressed dissatisfaction with the time required find notes among hundreds of irregularly structured titles. The authors' objective was to develop a document-naming nomenclature (DNN) that creates informative, structured note titles that improve information [...]

Decision support systems in the medical field have to be easily modified by medical experts themselves. The authors have designed a knowledge acquisition tool to facilitate the creation and maintenance of a knowledge base by the domain expert and its sharing and reuse by other institutions. The Unified Medical Language System (UMLS) contains the domain entities and constitutes the relations repository from which the expert builds, through a specific browser [...]

The track entitled "Consumer Informatics Supporting Patients as Co-Producers of Quality" at the AMIA Spring 2000 Congress was devoted to examining the new field of consumer health informatics. This area is developing rapidly, as worldwide changes are occurring in the organization and delivery of health care and in the traditional roles of patient and provider. This paper describes the key themes of the track; implications of the growing area of [...]

Prefetching methods have traditionally been used to restore archived images from picture archiving and communication systems to diagnostic imaging workstations prior to anticipated need, facilitating timely comparison of historical studies and patient management. The authors describe a problem-oriented prefetching scheme, detailing 1) a mechanism supporting selection of patients for prefetching via characterizations of clinical problems, using multiple data sources (picture archiving and communication systems, hospital information systems, and radiology information [...]