What's Ideal? A case study exploring handoff routines in practice.

Background: Handoffs of care in the healthcare system between responsible providers have traditionally been conceptualized and studied at the point of patient transfer. Thus, clinical practice and associated information systems are designed with the concept of the handoff as a solitary event. This viewpoint does not consider the routine activities necessary for a successful handoff.

Modeling the relationship between search terms in clinical queries.

We designed hedges for clinical queries sent to MEDLINE and Google in an attempt to explicitly model the relationship, such as treatment or diagnosis, between search terms. A pilot evaluation suggested that mean average precision (MAP) improved for a precomputed diagnostic query but not for a precomputed treatment query. An important limitation to this approach is that target resources do not explicitly model these relationships.

Computer-based documentation: effect on parent and physician satisfaction during a pediatric health maintenance encounter.

Objective: To investigate the impact of a computer-based documentation (CBD) tool on parent and physician satisfaction with a pediatric health maintenance encounter.

Design: The project used a preintervention and postintervention design. The preintervention group visits used paper-based forms for data entry, whereas the postintervention visits used CBD.

Methods for semi-automated indexing for high precision information retrieval.

Objective: To evaluate a new system, ISAID (Internet-based Semi-automated Indexing of Documents), and to generate textbook indexes that are more detailed and more useful to readers.

Design: Pilot evaluation: simple, nonrandomized trial comparing ISAID with manual indexing methods. Methods evaluation: randomized, cross-over trial comparing three versions of ISAID and usability survey.