Electronic health record data use in the assessment of quality indicators for glucocorticoid osteoporosis screening in systemic lupus erythematosus.

Objective: To determine whether electronic health record (EHR) data components could be identified and used to assess bone health quality indicators in patients with systemic lupus erythematosus as a foundation for population health management.

Methods: We identified patients in our EHR system who had diagnosis codes for lupus from 2012 to 2017 and characterized them based on the frequency and dosage of prescribed glucocorticoid medications. The medical records of patients who received repeated high-dose glucocorticoid orders were further reviewed for osteoporosis, osteoporotic fractures, receipt of appropriate preventive screening, and orders for protective medications based on established quality indicators.

Detecting the presence of an indwelling urinary catheter and urinary symptoms in hospitalized patients using natural language processing.

Objective: To develop a natural language processing pipeline to extract positively asserted concepts related to the presence of an indwelling urinary catheter in hospitalized patients from the free text of the electronic medical note. The goal is to assist infection preventionists and other healthcare professionals in determining whether a patient has an indwelling urinary catheter when a catheter-associated urinary tract infection is suspected. Currently, data on indwelling urinary catheters is not consistently captured in the electronic medical record in structured format and thus cannot be reliably extracted for clinical and research purposes.

Investigating the nucleic acid interactions and antimicrobial mechanism of buforin II.

Buforin II (BF2) is an antimicrobial peptide that is hypothesized to kill bacteria by entering cells and binding nucleic acids. To further investigate this proposed mechanism, we used computer modeling and experimental measurements to consider the interactions between BF2 and DNA. Computational and experimental results imply that the peptide forms specific interactions with DNA.

A putative coiled-coil domain of prohibitin is sufficient to repress E2F1-mediated transcription and induce apoptosis.

Prohibitin is a potential tumor suppressor protein that can repress E2F-mediated transcription and arrest cell proliferation. We had shown previously that prohibitin could bind to the Rb protein as well as E2F and this binding was necessary to suppress cell proliferation. Here we show that the E2F1 binding domain of prohibitin has the potential to fold into a coiled-coil structure.