The Importance of Financial Statements in Clinical Practice.

Background: Financial statements provide vital information to department chiefs and hospital leadership alike. They reflect departmental performance and guide critical financial decisions for their teams. However, financial statements can be inherently difficult to read and interpret and require time and attention, understandably challenging for busy clinicians.

Budgets: How They Are Planned, Prepared, and Managed.

Background: Budget planning and execution is as difficult as it is vital to any practice, whether academic, private, or group. Well-planned and executed budgets are a source of revenue and growth that fuels the practice for the next cycle. Conversely, poorly planned budget is disastrous, and a badly executed one invariably leads to unrecoverable losses.

Revenue Cycle Management: The Art and the Science.

Simply working hard is not enough to maintain a profitable clinical practice. Prompt and complete payment for services is just as critical. Revenue cycle management (RCM) tracks the payment process from patient scheduling through treatment, coding, billing, and reimbursement.

Balanced Business Decision-making for Clinical Practices: Fulfilling "Mission" and "Margin".

Clinical practices, both private and academic, need to be profitable to sustain themselves and grow. To manage them and drive profits, one needs leadership that has a well-rounded understanding of multiple facets. When business decisions are based on financial data alone, they meet the goal of profit margin but alienate clinicians; when made using clinical data alone, they fulfill the clinical mission but ignore the bottom line.

Testing the Decision Support Tool for Responsible Pain Management for Headache and Facial Pain Diagnosis with Opioid-Risk-Stratified Treatment.

In primary and urgent care, headache and facial pain are common and challenging to diagnose and manage, especially with using opioids appropriately. We therefore developed the Decision Support Tool for Responsible Pain Management (DS-RPM) to assist healthcare providers in diagnosis (including multiple simultaneous diagnoses), workup (including triage), and opioid-risk-informed treatment. A primary goal was to supply sufficient explanations of DS-RPM's functions allowing critique.

Augmentation of literature review of COVID-19 radiology.

We suggest an augmentation of the excellent comprehensive review article titled "Comprehensive literature review on the radiographic findings, imaging modalities, and the role of radiology in the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic" under the following categories: (1) "Inclusion of additional radiological features, related to pulmonary infarcts and to COVID-19 pneumonia"; (2) "Amplified discussion of cardiovascular COVID-19 manifestations and the role of cardiac magnetic resonance imaging in monitoring and prognosis"; (3) "Imaging findings related to fluorodeoxyglucose positron emission tomography, optical, thermal and other imaging modalities/devices, including 'intelligent edge' and other remote monitoring devices"; (4) "Artificial intelligence in COVID-19 imaging"; (5) "Additional annotations to the radiological images in the manuscript to illustrate the additional signs discussed"; and (6) "A minor correction to a passage on pulmonary destruction".

Tuberculosis conundrum - current and future scenarios: A proposed comprehensive approach combining laboratory, imaging, and computing advances.

Tuberculosis (TB) remains a global threat, with the rise of multiple and extensively drug resistant TB posing additional challenges. The International health community has set various 5-yearly targets for TB elimination: mathematical modelling suggests that a 2050 target is feasible with a strategy combining better diagnostics, drugs, and vaccines to detect and treat both latent and active infection. The availability of rapid and highly sensitive diagnostic tools (Gene-Xpert, TB-Quick) will vastly facilitate population-level identification of TB (including rifampicin resistance and through it, multi-drug-resistant TB).

Overcoming the Patent Gap: A Guide to Patenting for Plastic Surgeons.

Background: Patenting protects innovation, fosters academic incentives, promotes competition, and generates new revenue for clinician-inventors and their institutions. Despite these benefits, and despite plastic surgery's history of innovation, plastic surgery-related patent applications are few. The goal of this article was to use unpublished data and formulate a robust discussion.

Safe clinical photography: best practice guidelines for risk management and mitigation.

Clinical photography is an essential component of patient care in plastic surgery. The use of unsecured smartphone cameras, digital cameras, social media, instant messaging, and commercially available cloud-based storage devices threatens patients' data safety. This paper Identifies potential risks of clinical photography and heightens awareness of safe clinical photography.

Machine Learning in Relation to Emergency Medicine Clinical and Operational Scenarios: An Overview.

Health informatics is a vital technology that holds great promise in the healthcare setting. We describe two prominent health informatics tools relevant to emergency care, as well as the historical background and the current state of informatics. We also identify recent research findings and practice changes.

Quality of EHR data extractions for studies of preterm birth in a tertiary care center: guidelines for obtaining reliable data.

Background: The use of Electronic Health Records (EHR) has increased significantly in the past 15 years. This study compares electronic vs. manual data abstractions from an EHR for accuracy.

Predictive factors and practice trends in red blood cell transfusions for very-low-birth-weight infants.

Background: Red blood cell (RBC) transfusions in very-low-birth-weight (VLBW) infants, while common, carry risk. Our objective was to determine clinical predictors of and trends in RBC transfusions among VLBW infants.

Methods: RBC transfusion practice and its clinical predictors in 1,750 VLBW (≤1,500 g) infants were analyzed in a single-center cohort across sequential epochs: 2000-2004 (Epoch 1), 2005-2009 (Epoch 2), and 2010-2013 (Epoch 3).

The Greater Plains Collaborative: a PCORnet Clinical Research Data Network.

The Greater Plains Collaborative (GPC) is composed of 10 leading medical centers repurposing the research programs and informatics infrastructures developed through Clinical and Translational Science Award initiatives. Partners are the University of Kansas Medical Center, Children's Mercy Hospital, University of Iowa Healthcare, the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the Medical College of Wisconsin and Marshfield Clinic, the University of Minnesota Academic Health Center, the University of Nebraska Medical Center, the University of Texas Health Sciences Center at San Antonio, and the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center. The GPC network brings together a diverse population of 10 million people across 1300 miles covering seven states with a combined area of 679 159 square miles.

Radiation exposure and breast cancer: lessons from Chernobyl.

The lessons learned from the Chernobyl disaster have become increasingly important after the second anniversary of the Fukushima, Japan nuclear accident. Historically, data from the Chernobyl reactor accident 27 years ago demonstrated a strong correlation with thyroid cancer, but data on the radiation effects of Chernobyl on breast cancer incidence have remained inconclusive. We reviewed the published literature on the effects of the Chernobyl disaster on breast cancer incidence, using Medline and Scopus from the time of the accident to December of 2010.

An eUtils toolset and its use for creating a pipeline to link genomics and proteomics analyses to domain-specific biomedical literature.

Background: Numerous biomedical software applications access databases maintained by the US National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI). To ease software automation, NCBI provides a powerful but complex Web-service-based programming interface, eUtils. This paper describes a toolset that simplifies eUtils use through a graphical front-end that can be used by non-programmers to construct data-extraction pipelines.

Requirements for guidelines systems: implementation challenges and lessons from existing software-engineering efforts.

Background: A large body of work in the clinical guidelines field has identified requirements for guideline systems, but there are formidable challenges in translating such requirements into production-quality systems that can be used in routine patient care. Detailed analysis of requirements from an implementation perspective can be useful in helping define sub-requirements to the point where they are implementable. Further, additional requirements emerge as a result of such analysis.

Web-browser encryption of personal health information.

Background: Electronic health records provide access to an unprecedented amount of clinical data for research that can accelerate the development of effective medical practices. However it is important to protect patient confidentiality, as many medical conditions are stigmatized and disclosure could result in personal and/or financial loss.

Results: We describe a system for remote data entry that allows the data that would identify the patient to be encrypted in the web browser of the person entering the data.

Leveraging a clinical research information system to assist biospecimen data and workflow management: a hybrid approach.

Background: Large multi-center clinical studies often involve the collection and analysis of biological samples. It is necessary to ensure timely, complete and accurate recording of analytical results and associated phenotypic and clinical information. The TRIBE-AKI Consortium http://www.

Natural language processing: an introduction.

Objectives: To provide an overview and tutorial of natural language processing (NLP) and modern NLP-system design.

Target Audience: This tutorial targets the medical informatics generalist who has limited acquaintance with the principles behind NLP and/or limited knowledge of the current state of the art.

Scope: We describe the historical evolution of NLP, and summarize common NLP sub-problems in this extensive field.

Pretraining and posttraining assessment of residents' performance in the fourth accreditation council for graduate medical education competency: patient communication skills.

Hypothesis: Structured communication curricula will improve surgical residents' ability to communicate effectively with patients.

Design And Setting: A prospective study approved by the institutional review board involved 44 University of Connecticut general surgery residents. Residents initially completed a written baseline survey to assess general communication skills awareness.

Data standards for clinical research data collection forms: current status and challenges.

Case report forms (CRFs) are used for structured-data collection in clinical research studies. Existing CRF-related standards encompass structural features of forms and data items, content standards, and specifications for using terminologies. This paper reviews existing standards and discusses their current limitations.

Determining correspondences between high-frequency MedDRA concepts and SNOMED: a case study.

Background: The Systematic Nomenclature of Medicine Clinical Terms (SNOMED CT) is being advocated as the foundation for encoding clinical documentation. While the electronic medical record is likely to play a critical role in pharmacovigilance - the detection of adverse events due to medications - classification and reporting of Adverse Events is currently based on the Medical Dictionary of Regulatory Activities (MedDRA). Complete and high-quality MedDRA-to-SNOMED CT mappings can therefore facilitate pharmacovigilance.