Conducting Internet Research With the Transgender Population: Reaching Broad Samples and Collecting Valid Data.

Health research on transgender people has been hampered by the challenges inherent in studying a hard-to-reach, relatively small, and geographically dispersed population. The Internet has the potential to facilitate access to transgender samples large enough to permit examination of the diversity and syndemic health disparities found among this population. In this article, we describe the experiences of a team of investigators using the Internet to study HIV risk behaviors of transgender people in the United States.

Early detection of rotavirus gastrointestinal illness outbreaks by multiple data sources and detection algorithms at a pediatric health system.

Using data from over 450,000 pediatric encounters three data sources were evaluated for their ability to support early detection of a yearly outbreak of rotavirus disease: 1) Laboratory studies ordered, 2) Diagnosis codes, and 3) Free text "reason for visit" strings categorized as Gastrointestinal syndrome by a support vector machine software classifier. We found that in this setting the categorized free text analyzed through simple control charts detected each outbreak within 10 days of their beginning as determined by laboratory detection of rotavirus antigen (the gold standard). Outbreak detection by laboratory studies was delayed an average of 14 days and by diagnosis codes by an average of 20 days.

Evaluation of the implementation of an electronic medical record.

University of Minnesota Physicians, the faculty clinical practice organization of the Medical School, is implementing an Electronic Medical Record (EMR). During this process, we anticipated the need for an evaluative study of the implementation to examine process and satisfaction. This was in order to monitor the ability of the physicians to use the EMR effectively.