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Health care delivery systems and organizations around the world are undergoing reorganization and reengineering. Rational decision making about such activities must be based on information. Much of the presently available data is inadequate for this task, and therefore needs to be transformed. One such experience in the province of Alberta, Canada, is discussed. The development of a comprehensive information strategy, the need to apply information management principles, the organizational implications [...]

This article describes the implementation of a suite of computer programs to manage and provide access to a database containing the electronic documents that constitute the NIH-Guide that is distributed by the NIH on a weekly basis. The software consists of a management program that reads, processes, and stores the incoming documents and performs erratum updates on existing documents; an alerting program that sends selected information to users who have [...]

Conceptual models for diagnostic reasoning proposed in the medical literature are presented to stimulate discussion about the issue of the appropriateness of probabilistic knowledge-based systems for medical diagnosis. Evidence is presented to corroborate the authors' view that diagnosis is a problem-solving task, rather than a decision-making task. In the authors' opinion, probabilistic reasoning is better suited to situations dealing with choices for clinical intervention, rather than to those dealing with [...]

The overarching informatics grand challenge facing society is the creation of knowledge management systems that can acquire, conserve, organize, retrieve, display, and distribute what is known today in a manner that informs and educates, facilitates the discovery and creation of new knowledge, and contributes to the health and welfare of the planet. At one time the private, national, and university libraries of the world collectively constituted the memory of society's [...]

To explore the software design issues involved in implementing an operational information sources map (ISM) knowledge base (KB) and system of navigational tools that can help medical users access network-based information sources relevant to a biomedical question.

With the advent of hospital payment by diagnosis-related group (DRG), length of stay (LOS) has become a major issue in hospital efforts to control costs. Because the Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center (CPMC) has had above-average LOSs for many DRGs, the authors tested the hypothesis that a computer-generated informational message directed to physicians would shorten LOS.

To develop a representational schema for clinical data for use in exchanging data and applications, using a collaborative approach.

From my viewpoint as a patient, 1. Medical knowledge has expanded to the point that individuals cannot adequately improve quality without the assistance of computer programs. 2. The medical profession must concentrate on why and how computer program projects must be used, not on why they cannot be used. 3. The successful application of computer programs to clinical medicine is dependent mainly on the efforts of individual institutions and people [...]