Bob Mitchell, CMIO
“Although natural language processing (NLP) research in the clinical setting has occurred since the 1960s, progress in developing NLP applications for clinical text has been slow and lags behind progress made in the general NLP domain, according to an editorial in the September issue of Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association.
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Chapman WW et al, J Am Med Inform Assoc, 18(5)
This issue of JAMIA focuses on natural language processing (NLP) techniques for clinical-text information extraction. Several articles are offshoots of the yearly ‘Informatics for Integrating Biology and the Bedside’ (i2b2) (http://www.i2b2.org) NLP shared-task challenge, introduced by Uzuner et al (see page 552) and co-sponsored by the Veteran’s Administration for the last 2 years. This shared task follows long-running challenge evaluations in other fields, such as the Message Understanding Conference (MUC) for information extraction, TREC for text information retrieval, and CASP for protein structure prediction. Shared tasks in the clinical domain are recent and include annual i2b2 Challenges that began in 2006, a challenge for multi-label classification of radiology reports sponsored by Cincinnati Children’s Hospital in 2007, a 2011 Cincinnati Children’s Hospital challenge on suicide notes, and the 2011 TREC information retrieval shared task involving retrieval of clinical cases from narrative records.
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Ruby Raley, AxWay
“However, unified identity management is a complex problem and, the only way to really tackle this issue is to boil it down to the essential elements required for complying with the regulations.
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Peter Orszag, Bloomberg View
“Even with the all-too- depressing illustrations of political paralysis we’ve seen recently, government can still act to improve our lives. A good case in point: The U.S. health sector is rapidly digitizing, and federal legislation from early 2009, passed well before the health-care reform act, is an important reason why.
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Rick McMullen, Fast Company
“Last May, the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center shut down its living donor kidney transplant program because of a serious medical error. A man in need of a transplant was given a kidney from a donor who did not know she had tested positive for hepatitis C.
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Jolein de Rooij, Computable
“Nictiz maakt zich zorgen over de kosten van het vragen van toestemming aan patiënten voor verwerking van hun gegevens bij een eventuele landelijke doorstart van een elektronisch patiëntendossier (epd) zonder overheidssteun.
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Barbara Ficarra, KevinMD
“The conundrum continued behind conference doors at the American Telemedicine Association (ATA) conference in Tampa about the efficacy of mobile phone usage to improve patient health.
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Marty Briggs, Software Advice
“There has been a steady increase in electronic health record (EHR) software adoption by physicians and hospitals. The value-add is tremendous, and with the government incentives now in place, this growth is a no-brainer. However, Marty Briggs, Creative Director of Marketing for HealthFusion, points out one of the major issues with EHR’s, using a doctor’s visit as an example:
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Don Fluckinger, SearchHealthIT
“My name is Don Fluckinger. My pals and work colleagues will likely confirm that I am, er, a unique individual.
Last I checked, I’m the only Don Fluckinger on Facebook, which makes me a popular guy, a conduit for all the John Smiths I went to school with looking to friend our mutual pal Jim Johnson, but who can’t figure out which one of the thousands Jim Johnsons on Facebook is the right one (or is he James? Or does he still go by his high school nickname, “Flock of Seagulls?”) — until they friend me and access my friend list. Ditto for LinkedIn, Twitter and other social media sites.
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Peter Groen, OpenHealthNews
“We are seeing the emergence of Health eGames and Mobile Health Apps as part of the innovative fifth generation of multi-media computer interfaces for consumers that can be used to obtain information and interact with Electronic Health Record (EHR) and Personal Health Record (PHR) systems.
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Carl Natale, ICD10 Watch
“ICD-10 is not a new phenomenon in the world. The World Health Organization endorsed adoption in 1990. But the United States has made it very unique and complicated.
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CMIO
“New research published in August in BMC Health Services Research provides insight into potential travel reductions by leveraging telemedicine by patients and healthcare providers.
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Pamela Lewis Dolan, amednews
“A randomized controlled trial in the U.S. of a mobile app’s effectiveness at improving health outcomes found that patients who used a mobile health application to help manage their diabetes had better outcomes than those using traditional means.
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Brian Dolan, mobihealthnews
“Patients knowing that their health care provider is regularly reviewing their individual results dramatically improves adherence to wellness programs, according to a recent post by Dr. Joseph Kvedar of the Center for Connected Health (CCH) on their cHealth blog.
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Keith W. Boone, Healthcare IT News
“In “The XML Consensus is breaking down” Grahame Grieve distinguishes three camps, heavy engineering crowd, the internet mob, and the data dictionary crowd. He discusses how XML seems to be failing to bring these crowds together.
I’ve worked with structured documents and natural language processing for a long time, probably twice as long as I’ve been in healthcare. What I find interesting in healthcare is the nature of the information being used. Just for fun, I’m going to look at it from a document oriented perspective, since that’s what I’ve spent most of my life working with.”
Article
Keith W. Boone, Healthcare IT News, 17 August 2011
Neil Versel, InformationWeek
“An electronic health record (EHR) is more than just an electronic representation of a paper chart. It is a legal representation of a patient’s medical condition and treatment at a given point in time, one that could be admissible in court. And that could present a whole new set of challenges for healthcare organizations.
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Sabrina Rodak, Becker's Hospital Review
“Data security is becoming an increasing concern as technology becomes more embedded in our healthcare systems. Data breaches put patients’ and hospitals’ privacy at risk and force hospitals to spend significant amounts of money compensating affected patients and creating new defensive systems.
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e-Health Insider Acute
“The Information Standards Board for Health and Social Care has officially approved the SNOMED Clinical Terms healthcare terminology as a ‘fundamental standard’.
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Shanna Crispin, e-Health Insider
“Yet another review is being carried out into the viability of the HealthSpace organiser, which gives patients access to their Summary Care Record if it exists and they have an ‘advanced’ account.
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Li Y-C et al, J Am Med Inform Assoc, 2011
Tourism as well as international business travel creates health risks for individuals and populations both in host societies and home countries. One strategy to reduce health-related risks to travelers is to provide travelers and relevant caregivers timely, ongoing access to their own health information. Many websites offer health advice for travelers. For example, the WHO and US Department of State offer up-to-date health information about countries relevant to travel. However, little has been done to assure travelers that their medical information is available at the right place and time when the need might arise.
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