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: To develop a generic methodology for the online assessment of medical education materials available on the World Wide Web and to implement it for pilot subject areas.

The International Classification for Nursing Practice (ICNP) is a collaborative project under the auspices of the International Council of Nurses. The alpha version is available online for comment in preparation for the release of the beta version in 1999. The authors answer the most-frequently asked questions about the ICNP and encourage nurses in the United States to participate in the revision by sending comments and suggestions to the American Nurses [...]

Information has become a capital good and is focused on outcomes. Clinical guidelines are being developed to standardize care for populations, but patient preferences also need to be known when planning individualized care. Information technologies can be used to retrieve both types of information. The concern is that nurses are not adequately prepared to manage information using technology. This paper presents five strategic directions recommended by the National Advisory Council [...]

To examine the capability of a new object-oriented method called Tabular Application Development (TAD) in developing a hospital information system for a gastroenterology clinic.

Using electronic rather than paper-based record systems improves clinicians' information retrieval from patient narratives. However, few studies address how data should be organized for this purpose. Information retrieval from clinical narratives containing free text involves two steps: searching for a labeled segment and reading its content. The authors hypothesized that physicians can retrieve information better when clinical narratives are divided into many small, labeled segments ("high granularity").

Vancomycin-resistant enterococci represent an increasingly important cause of nosocomial infections. Minimizing vancomycin use represents a key strategy in preventing the spread of these infections.

Recent developments in medical informatics research have afforded possibilities for great advances in health care delivery. These exciting opportunities also present formidable challenges to the implementation and integration of technologies in the workplace. As in most domains, there is a gulf between technologic artifacts and end users. Since medical practice is a human endeavor, there is a need for bridging disciplines to enable clinicians to benefit from rapid technologic advances [...]

Even though medical informatics is most often viewed from the perspective of its host disciplines in clinical and biologic medicine, it has an identity and agenda of its own. This paper is an attempt to promote discussion about the long-term role and agenda for medical informatics as a discipline into the next decade. The discussion has two main lines of argument, one about the "engineering" goals of informatics and the [...]

The Patient Education and Activation System (PEAS) project aims to prepare people to take a more active role in their health care decisions. In this paper, the authors describe their work on the Layman Education and Activation Form (LEAF). LEAF is designed to be an interactive, Internet-based system for collecting a patient's medical history. It is unique in that it gives patients access to educational information when it is most [...]