High-Throughput Computing to Automate Population-Based Studies to Detect the 30-Day Risk of Adverse Outcomes After New Outpatient Medication Use in Older Adults with Chronic Kidney Disease: A Clinical Research Protocol.

Background: Safety issues are detected in about one third of prescription drugs in the years following regulatory agency approval. Older adults, especially those with chronic kidney disease, are at particular risk of adverse reactions to prescription drugs. This protocol describes a new approach that may identify credible drug-safety signals more efficiently using administrative health care data.

Understanding Discussions of Health Issues on Twitter: A Visual Analytic Study.

Social media allows for the exploration of online discussions of health issues outside of traditional health spaces. Twitter is one of the largest social media platforms that allows users to post short comments (i.e.

VINCENT: A visual analytics system for investigating the online vaccine debate.

This paper reports and describes VINCENT, a visual analytics system that is designed to help public health stakeholders (i.e., users) make sense of data from websites involved in the online debate about vaccines.

A Qualitative Study of the Theory Behind the Chairs: Balancing Lean-Accelerated Patient Flow With the Need for Privacy and Confidentiality in an Emergency Medicine Setting.

Background: Many emergency departments (EDs) have used the Lean methodology to guide the restructuring of their practice environments and patient care processes. Despite research cautioning that the layout and design of treatment areas can increase patients' vulnerability to privacy breaches, evaluations of Lean interventions have ignored the potential impact of these on patients' informational and physical privacy. If professional regulatory organizations are going to require that nurses and physicians interact with their patients privately and confidentially, we need to examine the degrees to which their practice environment supports them to do so.

Easier and Faster Is Not Always Better: Grounded Theory of the Impact of Large-Scale System Transformation on the Clinical Work of Emergency Medicine Nurses and Physicians.

Background: The effectiveness of Lean Thinking as a quality improvement method for health care has been contested due, in part, to our limited contextual understanding of how it affects the working conditions and clinical workflow of nurses and physicians. Although there are some initial indications, arising from prevalence surveys and interviews, that Lean may intensify work performed within medical environments, the evidence base still requires detailed descriptions of the changes that were actually introduced to individuals' clinical workflow and how these changes impacted health care professionals.

Objective: The aim of this study was to explore ways in which a Lean intervention may impact the clinical work of emergency medicine nurses and physicians.

Interactive visualization of public health indicators to support policymaking: An exploratory study.

Unlabelled: The purpose of this study is to examine the use of interactive visualizations to represent data/information related to social determinants of health and public health indicators, and to investigate the benefits of such visualizations for health policymaking.

Methods: The study developed a prototype for an online interactive visualization tool that represents the social determinants of health. The study participants explored and used the tool.

Beyond simple charts: Design of visualizations for big health data.

Health data is often big data due to its high volume, low veracity, great variety, and high velocity. Big health data has the potential to improve productivity, eliminate waste, and support a broad range of tasks related to disease surveillance, patient care, research, and population health management. Interactive visualizations have the potential to amplify big data's utilization.

Ontology-Driven Search and Triage: Design of a Web-Based Visual Interface for MEDLINE.

Background: Diverse users need to search health and medical literature to satisfy open-ended goals such as making evidence-based decisions and updating their knowledge. However, doing so is challenging due to at least two major difficulties: (1) articulating information needs using accurate vocabulary and (2) dealing with large document sets returned from searches. Common search interfaces such as PubMed do not provide adequate support for exploratory search tasks.

Reconsidering healthcare evidence as dynamic and distributed: the role of information and cognition.

Aim: The basic thrust of evidence-based healthcare is that current best evidence should be used explicitly and judiciously for diagnosis, management, and other activities in healthcare settings. For this to be possible, researchers, practitioners, and other stakeholders must have a clear and accurate conceptualization of what constitutes 'evidence' in healthcare environments, and the manner in which it is used in decision-making and other activities. Currently, the dominant conceptualization of evidence is that of a body of information that can be retrieved by stakeholders for use in healthcare practice.

The challenge of big data in public health: an opportunity for visual analytics.

Public health (PH) data can generally be characterized as big data. The efficient and effective use of this data determines the extent to which PH stakeholders can sufficiently address societal health concerns as they engage in a variety of work activities. As stakeholders interact with data, they engage in various cognitive activities such as analytical reasoning, decision-making, interpreting, and problem solving.

Beyond information access: Support for complex cognitive activities in public health informatics tools.

Public health professionals work with a variety of information sources to carry out their everyday activities. In recent years, interactive computational tools have become deeply embedded in such activities. Unlike the early days of computational tool use, the potential of tools nowadays is not limited to simply providing access to information; rather, they can act as powerful mediators of human-information discourse, enabling rich interaction with public health information.