Cluster Analysis reveals Socioeconomic Disparities among Elective Spine Surgery Patients.

This work demonstrates the use of cluster analysis in detecting fair and unbiased novel discoveries. Given a sample population of elective spinal fusion patients, we identify two overarching subgroups driven by insurance type. The Medicare group, associated with lower socioeconomic status, exhibited an over-representation of negative risk factors.

Making the case for workforce diversity in biomedical informatics to help achieve equity-centered care: a look at the AMIA First Look Program.

Developing a diverse informatics workforce broadens the research agenda and ensures the growth of innovative solutions that enable equity-centered care. The American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA) established the AMIA First Look Program in 2017 to address workforce disparities among women, including those from marginalized communities. The program exposes women to informatics, furnishes mentors, and provides career resources.

The Perceived Impact and Usability of a Care Management and Coordination System in Delivering Services to Vulnerable Populations: Mixed Methods Study.

Background: People with complex needs, such as those experiencing homelessness, require concurrent, seamless support from multiple social service agencies. Sonoma County, California has one of the nation's largest homeless populations among largely suburban communities. To support client-centered care, the county deployed a Care Management and Coordination System (CMCS).

A qualitative study of physician perspectives on adaptation to electronic health records.

Background: Electronic Health Records (EHRs) have the potential to improve many aspects of care and their use has increased in the last decade. Because of this, acceptance and adoption of EHRs is less of a concern than adaptation to use. To understand this issue more deeply, we conducted a qualitative study of physician perspectives on EHR use to identify factors that facilitate adaptation.

Building an Informed Consent Tool Starting with the Patient: The Patient-Centered Virtual Multimedia Interactive Informed Consent (VIC).

Patient safety and quality of care are at risk if the informed consent process does not emphasize patient comprehension. In this paper, we describe how we designed, developed, and evaluated an mHealth tool for advancing the informed consent process. Our tool enables the informed consent process to be performed on tablets (e.

Enabling health care decisionmaking through clinical decision support and knowledge management.

Objectives: To catalogue study designs used to assess the clinical effectiveness of CDSSs and KMSs, to identify features that impact the success of CDSSs/KMSs, to document the impact of CDSSs/KMSs on outcomes, and to identify knowledge types that can be integrated into CDSSs/KMSs.

Data Sources: MEDLINE(®), CINAHL(®), PsycINFO(®), and Web of Science(®).

Review Methods: We included studies published in English from January 1976 through December 2010.

Effect of clinical decision-support systems: a systematic review.

Background: Despite increasing emphasis on the role of clinical decision-support systems (CDSSs) for improving care and reducing costs, evidence to support widespread use is lacking.

Purpose: To evaluate the effect of CDSSs on clinical outcomes, health care processes, workload and efficiency, patient satisfaction, cost, and provider use and implementation.

Data Sources: MEDLINE, CINAHL, PsycINFO, and Web of Science through January 2011.

Development and evaluation of an ontology for guiding appropriate antibiotic prescribing.

Objectives: To develop and apply formal ontology creation methods to the domain of antimicrobial prescribing and to formally evaluate the resulting ontology through intrinsic and extrinsic evaluation studies.

Methods: We extended existing ontology development methods to create the ontology and implemented the ontology using Protégé-OWL. Correctness of the ontology was assessed using a set of ontology design principles and domain expert review via the laddering technique.

Creating an ontology for an antibiotic prescribing decision support system.

One of the most effective and immediate solutions to the growing antimicrobial resistance problem is to address the role of inappropriate prescribing. Ontologies can support judicious prescribing, but use of an ontology as part of a CDSS to support antibiotic therapeutic planning has not been fully explored. The proposed research project will create and evaluate an ontology for supporting a CDSS module that generates an antibiotic-mismatch alert to guide appropriate antibiotic prescribing.

Medication reconciliation using natural language processing and controlled terminologies.

Medication reconciliation (MR) is a process that seeks to assure that the medications a patient is supposed to take are the same as what they are actually taking. We have developed a method in which medication information (consisting of both coded data and narrative text) is extracted from twelve sources from two clinical information systems and assembled into a chronological sequence of medication history, plans, and orders that correspond to periods before, during and after a hospital admission. We use natural language processing, a controlled terminology, and a medication classification system to create matrices that can be used to determine the initiation, changes and discontinuation of medications over time.

Heuristic evaluation of eNote: an electronic notes system.

eNote is an electronic health record (EHR) system based on semi-structured narrative documents. A heuristic evaluation was conducted with a sample of five usability experts. eNote performed highly in: 1)consistency with standards and 2)recognition rather than recall.

Clinicians' perceptions of usability of eNote.

The purpose of this evaluation was to assess perceptions of usability of a new semi-structured electronic clinical note. Two focus groups were held, one with attending physicians and one with residents. Physicians described their experiences with eNote and their perceptions about the system.

PubMatrix: a tool for multiplex literature mining.

Background: Molecular experiments using multiplex strategies such as cDNA microarrays or proteomic approaches generate large datasets requiring biological interpretation. Text based data mining tools have recently been developed to query large biological datasets of this type of data. PubMatrix is a web-based tool that allows simple text based mining of the NCBI literature search service PubMed using any two lists of keywords terms, resulting in a frequency matrix of term co-occurrence.