Auditing Dynamic Links to Online Information Resources

Abstrac

Using Timeline Displays to Improve Medication Reconciliation

Abstract --Objective: To explore approaches for integrating and visualizing time-oriented medication data in narrative and structured formats and to address related issues on handling temporal abstraction, granularity, and uncertainty. The ultimate goal is to improve medication reconciliation by providing clinicians with more accurate medication information in patient care. Methods: An event taxonomy was generated to capture different combinations of clinical and temporal uncertainties. A prototype of a temporal visualization system was implemented using an open source software package called Timeline. Medications were parsed and mapped to the event taxonomy, and then represented in Timelines. Seventy-five medications from narrative discharge summary reports and seventy-nine medications from structured orders were used as data input for temporal visualization. Five physicians served as domain experts and answered ten proof-of-concept survey questions. Results: Overall positive feedback from experts suggested the potential value of the proposed timeline visualization method. Challenges were also identified, and future work will include reconciliation of medications from various sources based on temporal attributes and medication classification

Improving Adherence to Research Protocol Drug Exclusions using a Clinical Alerting System

Abstract Objective: To develop a general method for using the alerting function of an electronic health record (EHR

InterMed: An Internet-Based Medical Collaboratory

The InterMed Collaboratory is collaborative project involving six participating medical institutions (Stanford University, Columbia University, Brigham and Women's Hospital, Massachusetts General Hospital, McGill University, and the University of Utah). There are two broad mandates for the effort. The first is to further the development, sharing, and demonstration of numerous software and system components, data sets, procedures and tools that will facilitate the collaborations and support the application goals of these projects. The second is to provide a distributed suite of clinical applications, guidelines, and knowledge-bases for clinical, educational, and administrative purposes. We believe that, working together with the Internet as our vehicle for collaboration, we can: (1) accelerate our individual progress in building advanced clinical, educational, and research applications using components made available by our collaborators; (2) build new collaborative applications using shared components and methodology; and (3) provide a broadly applicable model for such collaborative work. The testbeds we have pursued are all clinical in their orientation, and their generalization to the larger informatics community, and to clinical practitioners, is an explicit goal of the work. Contact address: Edward H. Shortliffe, MD, PhD Professor of Medicine and of Computer Science MSOB X-215, 300 Pasteur Drive Stanford University School of Medicine Stanford, CA 94305-5479 USA 415/725-3385; fax: 415/725-7944 [email protected]; http://www-camis.stanford.edu/people/ehs -2- "Between collaboration and competition lies cooperation. Both collaboration and cooperation imply sharing data and other scientific resources. But the motivations and expected benefits are quite different. Coo..