Five Years of Clinical Informatics Board Certification for Physicians in the United States of America.

Objectives:  To review the highlights of the new Clinical Informatics subspecialty including its history, certification requirements, development of and performance on the certification examination in the United States.

Methods:  We reviewed processes for the development of a subspecialty. Data from board certification examinations were collated and analyzed.

Age at Diagnosis as a Relative Contraindication for Intervention in Facial Nonmelanoma Skin Cancer.

This study examines the utility of excising facial nonmelanoma skin cancer in very elderly patients.

Milestones: Critical Elements in Clinical Informatics Fellowship Programs.

Background: Milestones refer to points along a continuum of a competency from novice to expert. Resident and fellow assessment and program evaluation processes adopted by the ACGME include the mandate that programs report the educational progress of residents and fellows twice annually utilizing Milestones developed by a specialty specific ACGME working group of experts. Milestones in clinical training programs are largely unmapped to specific assessment tools.

Clinical Informatics Fellowship Programs: In Search of a Viable Financial Model: An open letter to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.

In the US, the new subspecialty of Clinical Informatics focuses on systems-level improvements in care delivery through the use of health information technology (HIT), data analytics, clinical decision support, data visualization and related tools. Clinical informatics is one of the first subspecialties in medicine open to physicians trained in any primary specialty. Clinical Informatics benefits patients and payers such as Medicare and Medicaid through its potential to reduce errors, increase safety, reduce costs, and improve care coordination and efficiency.

Scholar quest: a residency research program aligned with faculty goals.

Introduction: The ACGME requires that residents perform scholarly activities prior to graduation, but this is difficult to complete and challenging to support. We describe a residency research program, taking advantage of environmental change aligning resident and faculty goals, to become a contributor to departmental cultural change and research development.

Methods: A research program, Scholar Quest (SQ), was developed as a part of an Information Mastery program.

Sepsis bundles and compliance with clinical guidelines.

Realizing the vast medical benefits of validated protocols, recommendations and practice guidelines requires acceptance and implementation by frontline care providers. Knowledge translation is the science of accelerating the transfer of knowledge to practice by understanding and creatively addressing the barriers that prevent adoption of new professional standards. In an attempt to improve patient care and reduce mortality, the Surviving Sepsis Campaign and The Institute for Healthcare Improvement created the resuscitation and management bundles for patients with severe sepsis and septic shock.

Clinical informatics board certification: history, current status, and predicted impact on the clinical informatics workforce.

Within health and health care, medical informatics and its subspecialties of biomedical, clinical, and public health informatics have emerged as a new discipline with increasing demands for its own work force. Knowledge and skills in medical informatics are widely acknowledged as crucial to future success in patient care, research relating to biomedicine, clinical care, and public health, as well as health policy design. The maturity of the domain and the demand on expertise necessitate standardized training and certification of professionals.

Core content for the subspecialty of clinical informatics.

The Core Content for Clinical Informatics defines the boundaries of the discipline and informs the Program Requirements for Fellowship Education in Clinical Informatics. The Core Content includes four major categories: fundamentals, clinical decision making and care process improvement, health information systems, and leadership and management of change. The AMIA Board of Directors approved the Core Content for Clinical Informatics in November 2008.

Program requirements for fellowship education in the subspecialty of clinical informatics.

The Program Requirements for Fellowship Education identify the knowledge and skills that physicians must master through the course of a training program to be certified in the subspecialty of clinical informatics. They also specify accreditation requirements for clinical informatics training programs. The AMIA Board of Directors approved this document in November 2008.

Initial voluntary program standards for fellowship training in palliative medicine.

Initial voluntary standards for fellowship programs in palliative medicine were developed through a collaborative process involving the directors of fellowship training programs, the American Academy of Hospice and Palliative Medicine (AAHPM), and the American Board of Hospice and Palliative Medicine (ABHPM). These groups worked with a consultant and representatives from the American Board of Medical Specialties (ABMS) and the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education (ACGME) to create a training structure for the programs that will maximize the likelihood for recognition and accreditation of the subspecialty. An accreditation group modeled after an ACGME residency review committee will be formed to review and adopt the standards, then accredit programs voluntarily.

Report of the Task Force on Residency Training Information (1999-2000), American Board of Emergency Medicine.

The American Board of Emergency Medicine gathers extensive background information on emergency medicine residents and the programs in which they train. We present the third annual report on the status of US emergency medicine residency programs. [American Board of Emergency Medicine.

Report of the Task Force on Residency Training Information (1998-1999), American Board of Emergency Medicine.

The American Board of Emergency Medicine gathers extensive background information on emergency medicine residents and the programs in which they train. We present the second annual report on the status of US emergency medicine residency programs. [American Board of Emergency Medicine: Report of the Task Force on Residency Training Information (1998-1999), American Board of Emergency Medicine.

American Board of Emergency Medicine Longitudinal Study of Emergency Physicians.

Study Objective: The American Board of Emergency Medicine (ABEM) Longitudinal Study of Emergency Physicians (LSEP) was initiated to describe the development of a new medical specialty through the continuing study of the lives of representative emergency physicians. The study is designed to gather data periodically over many years to come. The primary purpose of this article is to provide a baseline for the information obtained and the methods used to develop the ABEM LSEP.

Report of the Task Force on Residency Training Information, American Board of Emergency Medicine.

The American Board of Emergency Medicine gathers extensive background information on emergency medicine residents and the programs in which they train. Before the compilation of this report, this information has not been widely available.

The future of the certification system in emergency medicine.

The heart of the specialty of emergency medicine, like all specialties and subspecialties, is training. The excellence in medical care that has accrued to the American public has proceeded from the belief that a well-defined and accredited program of education will produce the highest probability that a physician providing care will be competent. There is now a joint opportunity in emergency medicine to build a certification and recertification system that meets the criteria to provide the highest quality care for the public and to offer an efficient and effective system for the members of the specialty.

Longitudinal study of emergency physicians by the American Board of Emergency Medicine: 1995 interim survey results.

Study Objective: To obtain current demographic data and information regarding the opinion of a stratified random sample of emergency physicians about the greatest current challenges facing emergency medicine.

Methods: An annual survey was conducted by the American Board of Emergency Medicine (ABEM) using a stratified random sample of 1,004 emergency physicians selected from four cohorts, 1979, 1984, 1988, and 1993. These samples were further divided between diplomates who had completed emergency medicine residency training and those who had not.

The sensorineural specializations of the trunk tip (finger) of the Asian elephant, Elephas maximus.

Background: The dorsal extension of the tip of the trunk of Asian elephants (Elephas maximus), often referred to as "the finger," possesses remarkable mechanical dexterity and is used for a variety of special behaviors including grasping food and tactile and ultimately chemosensory recognition via the vomeronasal organ. The present study describes a unique sensory innervation of this specialized region of the trunk.

Methods: The tip of the dorsal aspect of the trunk is referred to as the trunk tip finger and has been studied grossly in 13 living elephants.

An experimental painful peripheral neuropathy due to nerve constriction. I. Axonal pathology in the sciatic nerve.

A constriction injury to the sciatic nerve of the rat produces a painful peripheral neuropathy that is similar to the conditions seen in man. The pathology of the sciatic nerve in these animals was examined at 10 days postinjury, when the abnormal pain sensations are near maximal severity. The nerves were examined with (1) complete series of silver-stained longitudinal sections of pieces of the nerve (3 cm or more) that contained the constriction injury in the center, (2) toluidine blue-stained semithin sections taken at least 1 cm proximal and 1 cm distal to the constriction, and (3) EM sections taken adjacent to those stained with toluidine blue.

The differentiation of the skin and its appendages. II. Altered development of papillary ridges following neuralectomy.

In order to test the hypothesis that the nervous system is an important determinant of skin differentiation, deletions of the left lumbosacral dorsal root ganglia (DRGs), the sources of cutaneous afferents to the left hindpaw, were performed on opossum pups at day 1 when hindpaws have just begun to be innervated. At birth, each lumbosacral DRG measures about 200 microns rostrocaudally and a deletion measuring 1 mm would span 4-5 DRGs. Following survival periods of 5-24 days, serial sections through the trunk documented partial left lumbosacral DRG deletion and a variable degree of spinal cord destruction.

The differentiation of the skin and its appendages. I. Normal development of papillary ridges.

In the present study, the normal development of papillary ridges was studied in the volar pads of both fore and hindpaws of the opossum, Monodelphis domesticus. At birth, the developmental state of the opossum's paws is equivalent to that of a six-week human embryo. The development of papillary ridges in the opossum occurs entirely postnatally and the hindpaw lags behind the forepaw by at least four days in most developmental parameters.