Preconception low dose aspirin and time to pregnancy: findings from the effects of aspirin in gestation and reproduction randomized trial.

Objective: The objective was to determine the effect of preconception-initiated daily low-dose aspirin (LDA; 81 mg/day) treatment on time to pregnancy in women with a history of pregnancy loss.

Design: This was a multicenter, block-randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled trial. Participants were block-randomized by center and eligibility stratum.

The evaluation of lumbar multifidus muscle function via palpation: reliability and validity of a new clinical test.

Background Context: The lumbar multifidus muscle provides an important contribution to lumbar spine stability, and the restoration of lumbar multifidus function is a frequent goal of rehabilitation. Currently, there are no reliable and valid physical examination procedures available to assess lumbar multifidus function among patients with low back pain.

Purpose: To examine the inter-rater reliability and concurrent validity of the multifidus lift test (MLT) to identify lumbar multifidus dysfunction among patients with low back pain.

Thyroperoxidase and thyroglobulin antibodies in early pregnancy and placental abruption.

Objective: To estimate the relationship between thyroid antibodies and placental abruption.

Methods: This cohort study assesses thyroperoxidase and thyroglobulin antibodies in relation to placental abruption among 10,062 women with singleton viable pregnancies (from the First and Second Trimester Risk of Aneuploidy [FaSTER] trial). A thyroperoxidase antibody cutoff of 50 international units/mL is used for comparison with published data from another cohort.

Thyroperoxidase and thyroglobulin antibodies in early pregnancy and preterm delivery.

Objective: To further evaluate the relationship between thyroid antibodies and preterm births.

Methods: This is a prospective study of pregnancy outcome and demographic data combined with retrospective measurement of thyroperoxidase and thyroglobulin antibodies. Sera were obtained at 11-13 and 15-18 weeks of gestation from 10,062 women with singleton viable pregnancies (a subset from the First- and Second-Trimester Risk of Aneuploidy [FaSTER] trial).

An agent based simulation tool for scheduling emergency department physicians.

Emergency department overcrowding is a problem that threatens the public health of communities and compromises the quality of care given to individual patients. The Institute of Medicine recommends that hospitals employ information technology and operations research methods to reduce overcrowding. This paper describes the development of an agent based simulation tool that has been designed to evaluate the impact of various physician staffing configurations on patient waiting times in the emergency department.

Generating nurse profiles from computerized labor and delivery documentation.

This paper presents methods for generating nurse profiles using computerized documentation. NuProGen (Nurse Profile Generator), a custom-built knowledge discovery tool, enabled profile generation by calculating the numbers of various complicated patient cases (including high body mass index, bleeding, and multiple gestation) managed by each of 91 Labor and Delivery nurses at a single Intermountain Healthcare facility during the 3-month study period of January through March 2007. The tool identified patterns of documentation recorded by each nurse, as well as nursing care patterns associated with each of the three patient conditions examined in the study.

Extracting nursing practice patterns from structured labor and delivery data sets.

This study was designed to demonstrate the feasibility of a computerized care process model that provides real-time case profiling and outcome forecasting. A methodology was defined for extracting nursing practice patterns from structured point-of-care data collected using the labor and delivery information system at Intermountain Healthcare. Data collected during January 2006 were retrieved from Intermountain Healthcare's enterprise data warehouse for use in the study.

Data preparation framework for preprocessing clinical data in data mining.

Electronic health records are designed to provide online transactional data recording and reporting services that support the health care process. The characteristics of clinical data as it originates during the process of clinical documentation, including issues of data availability and complex representation models can make data mining applications challenging. Data preprocessing and transformation are required before one can apply data mining to clinical data.

Detection of pediatric respiratory and gastrointestinal outbreaks from free-text chief complaints.

We conducted a retrospective study to ascertain the potential of free-text chief complaints collected in pediatric emergency departments to serve as surveillance data for early detection of outbreaks. We determined that automatically coded chief complaint data provide a signal that reflects outbreaks in a population of children less than five years of age. Using the Exponentially Weighted Moving Average (EWMA) detection algorithm, we measured the timeliness, sensitivity, and specificity of free-text chief complaints for predicting outbreaks of pediatric respiratory and gastrointestinal illness.