Using electronic questionnaires to collect patient reported history.

EMR adoption has faced a major barrier around time and effort required to enter clinical data. In addition, patient entered data has not been effectively used by clinicians to identify critical clinical issues and drive best clinical interventions. By allowing patients to enter historical clinical data, using online questionnaires before their visit, it will have a positive impact on office workflow, physician and patient satisfaction, and support population based health and risk assessment.

Feasibility of using a large Clinical Data Warehouse to automate the selection of diagnostic cohorts.

Data from Clinical Data Warehouses (CDWs) can be used for retrospective studies and for benchmarking. However, automated identification of cases from large datasets containing data items in free text fields is challenging. We developed an algorithm for categorizing pediatric patients presenting with respiratory distress into Bronchiolitis, Bacterial pneumonia and Asthma using clinical variables from a CDW.