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As key stakeholders from the clinical setting and vendor communities, the authors share a summary of their collective experience related to the challenges and issues associated with implementing the vocabularies recognized by the American Nurses Association in several installations of commercially available clinical information systems. Although the focus of the article is on summarizing the challenges and issues, it is of note that the authors' experiences across care settings suggest [...]

Adverse drug events (ADEs) are both common and costly. Most hospitals identify ADEs using spontaneous reporting, but this approach lacks sensitivity; chart review identifies more events but is expensive. Computer-based approaches to ADE identification appear promising, but they have not been directly compared with chart review and they are not widely used.

If nurses, physicians, and health care planners knew more about patients' health-related preferences, care would most likely be cheaper, more effective, and closer to the individuals' desires. In order for patient preferences to be effectively used in the delivery of health care, it is important that patients be able to formulate and express preferences, that these judgments be made known to the clinician at the time of care, and that [...]

ACT/DB is a client-server database application for storing clinical trials and outcomes data, which is currently undergoing initial pilot use. It stores most of its data in entity-attribute-value form. Such data are segregated according to data type to allow indexing by value when possible, and binary large object data are managed in the same way as other data. ACT/DB lets an investigator design a study rapidly by defining the parameters [...]

The purpose of the study is to determine how frequently critical laboratory results (CLRs) occur and how rapidly they are acted upon. A CLR was defined as a result that met either the critical reporting criteria used by the laboratory at Brigham and Women's Hospital or other, more complex criteria.

A primary goal of the University of Pittsburgh's 1990-94 UMLS-sponsored effort was to develop and evaluate PostDoc (a lexical indexing system) and Pindex (a statistical indexing system) comparatively, and then in combination as a hybrid system. Each system takes as input a portion of the free text from a narrative part of a patient's electronic medical record and returns a list of suggested MeSH terms to use in formulating a [...]

Conceptualization of the physical objects and spaces that constitute the human body at the macroscopic level of organization, specified as a machine-parseable ontology that, in its human-readable form, is comprehensible to both expert and novice users of anatomical information.

Entity--attribute--value (EAV) tables form the major component of several mainstream electronic patient record systems (EPRSs). Such systems have been optimized for real-time retrieval of individual patient data. Data warehousing, on the other hand, involves cross-patient data retrieval based on values of patient attributes, with a focus on ad hoc query. Attribute-centric query is inherently more difficult when data are stored in EAV form than when they are stored conventionally. The [...]