CiteULike: erisu's library [92 articles]

Safe and Sound: Artificial Intelligence in Hazardous Applications

John Fox — 2008-06-04T13:45:44-00:00

(07 July 2000)

Computer science and artificial intelligence are increasingly used in the hazardous and uncertain realms of medical decision making, where small faults or errors can spell human catastrophe. This book describes, from both practical and theoretical perspectives, an AI technology for supporting sound clinical decision making and safe patient management. The technology combines techniques from conventional software engineering with a systematic method for building intelligent agents. Although the focus is on medicine, many of the ideas can be applied to AI systems in other hazardous settings. The book also covers a number of general AI problems, including knowledge representation and expertise modeling, reasoning and decision making under uncertainty, planning and scheduling, and the design and implementation of intelligent agents. The book, written in an informal style, begins with the medical background and motivations, technical challenges, and proposed solutions. It then turns to a wide-ranging discussion of intelligent and autonomous agents, with particular reference to safety and hazard management. The final section provides a detailed discussion of the knowledge representation and other aspects of the agent model developed in the book, along with a formal logical semantics for the language.

RESTful Web Services

Leonard Richardson — 2007-09-20T13:57:18-00:00

(08 May 2007)

"Every developer working with the Web needs to read this book." -- David Heinemeier Hansson, creator of the Rails framework "RESTful Web Services finally provides a practical roadmap for constructing services that embrace the Web, instead of trying to route around it." -- Adam Trachtenberg, PHP author and EBay Web Services Evangelist You've built web sites that can be used by humans. But can you also build web sites that are usable by machines? That's where the future lies, and that's what RESTful Web Services shows you how to do. The World Wide Web is the most popular distributed application in history, and Web services and mashups have turned it into a powerful distributed computing platform. But today's web service technologies have lost sight of the simplicity that made the Web successful. They don't work like the Web, and they're missing out on its advantages. This book puts the "Web" back into web services. It shows how you can connect to the programmable web with the technologies you already use every day. The key is REST, the architectural style that drives the Web. This book:<ul> <li>Emphasizes the power of basic Web technologies -- the HTTP application protocol, the URI naming standard, and the XML markup language</li> <li>Introduces the Resource-Oriented Architecture (ROA), a common-sense set of rules for designing RESTful web services</li> <li>Shows how a RESTful design is simpler, more versatile, and more scalable than a design based on Remote Procedure Calls (RPC)</li> <li>Includes real-world examples of RESTful web services, like Amazon's Simple Storage Service and the Atom Publishing Protocol</li> <li>Discusses web service clients for popular programming languages</li> <li>Shows how to implement RESTful services in three popular frameworks -- Ruby on Rails, Restlet (for Java), and Django (for Python)</li> <li>Focuses on practical issues: how to design and implement RESTful web services and clients</li> </ul> This is the first book that applies the REST design philosophy to real web services. It sets down the best practices you need to make your design a success, and the techniques you need to turn your design into working code. You can harness the power of the Web for programmable applications: you just have to work with the Web instead of against it. This book shows you how.

Student Motivation and Epistemological Beliefs

Michael Paulsen — 2008-04-10T07:47:52-00:00

New Directions for Teaching and Learning, Vol. 1999, No. 78. (1999), pp. 17-25.

Students' motivation to learn is related to their epistemological beliefs. Faculty can promote student motivation by designing learning activities that facilitate student development of more sophisticated epistemological beliefs.

Person-Centered Health Records: Toward HealthePeople (Health Informatics)

James Demetriades — 2008-04-01T12:35:06-00:00

(03 March 2005)

Person-Centered Health Records: Toward HealthePeople provides essential information on person-centered healthcare systems that will serve individuals throughout their lifetime, enabling a new approach to wellness that goes far beyond outpatient visits to the physician’s office or hospitalizations. These health systems represent a profound transformation from the present healthcare system because they will enable individuals to protect and promote their own personal health. The center of the healthcare system will be those individuals – not the entities such as hospitals or physician groups. And the circle will encompass the full range of activities that contribute to wellness and to fighting disease – not just those services traditionally defined as "healthcare." The book consists of three important sections. Section I addresses how the new person-centered system will change the way individuals care for their own health, giving them health records that accompany them throughout their lives, across the full range of experiences that affect their health. Section II lays out considerations involved in building new systems, including the need to address human factors such as control and ownership and the difficulties involved in relearning and learning to function in changed workflow environments. The third section focuses on approaches to transformation including focuses on delivering change, open source health systems, critical standards convergence, and person-centered systems now in place outside the United States. Chapter highlights include Clinical Impact, Human Factors, Health Security and Privacy, Critical Standards Convergence, and much more. To represent the book’s depth and breadth, the editors have brought together contributors from varied health care sectors in the United States and elsewhere – public and private, not-for-profit and for-profit – to explicate the concept of the electronic health record and to define the technological enablers that can make it a reality. The editors describe the concept involved in transformation, define the architectural issues and tools involved in building new person-centered systems, and describe the approaches that make it possible to integrate concept, architecture, and tools into person-centered health systems. Person-Centered Health Records: Toward HealthePeople is a must-have for those with an interest in person-centered health systems that can be built using the Web and Web-based tools. Both business and technical leaders will benefit from reading this book.

Aspects of Electronic Health Record Systems (Health Informatics)

Harold Lehmann — 2008-04-01T12:27:08-00:00

(21 March 2006)

As adoption of Electronic Health Record Systems (EHR-Ss) shifts from early adopters to mainstream, an increasingly large group of decision makers must assess what they want from EHR-Ss and how to go about making their choices. The purpose of this book is to inform that decision. This book explains typical needs of a variety of stakeholders, describes current and imminent technologies, and assesses the available evidence regarding issues in implementing and using EHR-Ss. Divided into four important sections--Needs, Current State, Technology, and Going Forward--the book provides the background and general notions regarding the EHRS and lays out the framework; delves into the historical review; presents a high-level view of EHR systems, focused on the needs of different stakeholders in the health care and the health enterprise; offers practical views of existing systems and current (and short-term future) issues in specifying a EHR system and deciding how to approach the institution of such a system; deals with technology issues, from front- to back-end; and describes where we are and where we should be going with EHR systems. Designed for use by chief information officers, chief medical informatics officers, medical liaisons to hospital systems, private practitioners, and business managers at academic and non-academic hospitals, care management organizations, and practices. The book could be used in any medical or health informatics course, at any level (undergrad, fellowship, MBA).

EHR Implementation: A Step-by-Step Guide for the Medical Practice (American Medical Association)

Carolyn Hartley — 2008-04-01T12:26:28-00:00

(28 February 2005)

An invaluable resource that guides physicians and administrators through the evaluation, selection, negotiation and culture management transition to an electronic environment. Provides a logical and well-defined, step-by-step EHR selection and implementation process for your medical practice.

Customer-Driven Development for Rapid Production of Assessment Learning Objects - the Depot

A Adams — 2007-07-26T09:45:27-00:00

Electronic Journal of E-Learning, Vol. 4, No. 1. (2006)

Learner-centered design: the challenge for HCI in the 21st century

Elliot Soloway — 2006-02-23T14:21:49-00:00

interactions, Vol. 1, No. 2. (April 1994), pp. 36-48.

Microworlds: transforming education

S Papert — 2006-02-19T02:54:47-00:00

(1987), pp. 79-94.

How People Learn (and What Technology Might Have To Do with It). ERIC Digest.

Marcy Driscoll — 2008-02-13T05:33:58-00:00

No paper, but the same routines: a qualitative exploration of experiences in two Norwegian hospitals deprived of the paper based medical record

Jan-Tore Lium — 2008-01-12T03:45:42-00:00

BMC Medical Informatics and Decision Making, Vol. 8 (10 January 2008), 2.

Montesori Controversy

John Chattin-Mcnichols — 2008-01-25T15:13:55-00:00

(01 September 1991)

E-learning 2.0

Stephen Downes — 2006-02-12T06:13:15-00:00

eLearn, Vol. 2005, No. 10. (October 2005)

The Cambridge Handbook of Multimedia Learning

Richard Mayer — 2006-12-21T17:03:35-00:00

(15 August 2005)

During the past 10 years, the field of multimedia learning has emerged as a coherent discipline with an accumulated research base that has never been synthesized and organized. This reference constitutes an original work devoted to comprehensive coverage of research and theory in the field of multimedia learning. It focuses on how people learn from words and pictures in computer-based environments. Multimedia environments include online instructional presentations, interactive lessons, e-courses, simulation Games, virtual reality, and computer-supported, in-class presentations.

Multimedia Learning

Richard Mayer — 2006-08-20T18:00:59-00:00

(23 April 2001)

For hundreds of years verbal messages have been the primary means of explaining ideas to learners. Although verbal learning offers a powerful tool for humans, this book explores ways of going beyond the purely verbal. An alternative to purely verbal presentations is to use multimedia presentations in which people learn from both words and pictures--a situation the author calls multimedia learning. Multimedia encyclopedias have become the latest addition to students' reference tools, and the world wide web is full of messages that combine words and pictures. This book summarizes ten years of research aimed at realizing the promise of multimedia learning.

Do medical students watch video clips in eLearning and do these facilitate learning?

K Romanov — 2007-10-04T12:11:14-00:00

Med Teach, Vol. 29, No. 5. (June 2007), pp. 490-494.

Background: There is controversial evidence of the impact of individual learning style on students' performance in computer-aided learning. Aims: We assessed the association between the use of multimedia materials, such as video clips, and collaborative communication tools with learning outcome among medical students. Method: One hundred and twenty-one third-year medical students attended a course in medical informatics (0.7 credits) consisting of lectures, small group sessions and eLearning material. The eLearning material contained six learning modules with integrated video clips and collaborative learning tools in WebCT. Learning outcome was measured with a course exam. Results: Approximately two-thirds of students (68.6%) viewed two or more videos. Female students were significantly more active video-watchers. No significant associations were found between video-watching and self-test scores or the time used in eLearning. Video-watchers were more active in WebCT; they loaded more pages and more actively participated in discussion forums. Video-watching was associated with a better course grade. Conclusions: Students who watched video clips were more active in using collaborative eLearning tools and achieved higher course grades. Practice points Almost 20% of third year medical students neglected video clips as a multimedia learning tool. Female medical students more actively used multimedia content in eLearning. Video-watchers more frequently used the collaborative discussion tools. Students who watched video clips were more active in using collaborative eLearning tools and achieved higher course grades.

Learning outcomes in medical informatics: Comparison of a WebCT course with ordinary web site learning material.

Kalle Romanov — 2005-08-15T11:06:57-00:00

Int J Med Inform (3 August 2005)

OBJECTIVE:: The purpose of this study is to compare whether students' learning outcomes would be better in a designed learning environment (WebCT) than in a conventional web site (WWW) with similar course material but without special learning tools. CONTEXT:: Third-year medical students in an introductory course on medical informatics at the University of Helsinki, Finland. METHODS:: Students were randomly assigned to a WebCT group (n=39) and a WWW group (n=46). The students in the WebCT group utilized the course material in general discussion groups, special discussions about lectures, quizzes and students' own notes. The WWW group had access only to the course material. The learning outcome was assessed by administering an on-line examination and the learning experience of the students was assessed by an on-line quiz. RESULTS:: The course grade was significantly higher in the WebCT group as compared to the WWW group. This finding was more prominent among females. The students of the WebCT group also experienced significantly more improvement in collaboration with the use of computers than the students in the WWW group. CONCLUSIONS:: Based on our results, web-based learning seems to be more effective when students are provided with specially designed learning tools.

Where are we with Web-based learning in medical education?

DA Cook — 2008-01-17T05:12:42-00:00

Med Teach, Vol. 28, No. 7. (November 2006), pp. 594-598.

This article summarizes several years of research in Web-based learning (WBL) to illustrate that, in general, research fails to address the questions that will inform our use of this powerful tool. In particular, media-comparative research--the comparison of WBL to another medium (e.g. lecture)--is hopelessly confounded and does little to inform practice. Rather than asking 'If' we should use WBL (we should!), researchers should ask 'How' and 'When' to use WBL. 'How' will be answered by evaluating specific elements of instructional design including theory-based instructional methods, adaptations to individual characteristics and details of presentation enhancements. 'When' will require study of issues such as just-in-time learning, effective use of simulation, and integration of WBL within and between institutions. Both quantitative and qualitative research methods will be useful. Educators should also look outside medical education for evidence and theories to guide their practice. Finally, while WBL has many advantages it is not inherently better than other media. The author suggests that learning outcomes be defined first and WBL be used only when it appears to be the most effective means of achieving these outcomes.

Web-based learning: pros, cons and controversies.

DA Cook — 2008-01-17T05:11:15-00:00

Clin Med, Vol. 7, No. 1. (b 2007), pp. 37-42.

Advantages of web-based learning (WBL) in medical education include overcoming barriers of distance and time, economies of scale, and novel instructional methods, while disadvantages include social isolation, up-front costs, and technical problems. Web-based learning is purported to facilitate individualised instruction, but this is currently more vision than reality. More importantly, many WBL instructional designs fail to incorporate principles of effective learning, and WBL is often used for the wrong reasons (e.g., for the sake of technology). Rather than trying to decide whether WBL is superior to or equivalent to other instructional media (research addressing this question will always be confounded), we should accept it as a potentially powerful instructional tool, and focus on learning when and how to use it. Educators should recognise that high fidelity, multimedia, simulations, and even WBL itself will not always be necessary to effectively facilitate learning.

A survey and analysis of Electronic Healthcare Record standards

Marco Eichelberg — 2006-04-28T12:40:17-00:00

ACM Comput. Surv., Vol. 37, No. 4. (December 2005), pp. 277-315.

Beautiful Code: Leading Programmers Explain How They Think (Theory in Practice (O'Reilly))

Andy Oram — 2007-08-12T06:00:08-00:00

(26 June 2007)

How do the experts solve difficult problems in software development? In this unique and insightful book, leading computer scientists offer case studies that reveal how they found unusual, carefully designed solutions to high-profile projects. You will be able to look over the shoulder of major coding and design experts to see problems through their eyes. This is not simply another design patterns book, or another software engineering treatise on the right and wrong way to do things. The authors think aloud as they work through their project's architecture, the tradeoffs made in its construction, and when it was important to break rules. Beautiful Code is an opportunity for master coders to tell their story. All author royalties will be donated to Amnesty International. The book includes: Chapter 1, A Regular Expression Matcher, by Brian Kernighan, shows how deep insight into a language and a problem can lead to a concise and elegant solution. Chapter 2, Subversion's Delta Editor: Interface as Ontology, by Karl Fogel, starts with a well-chosen abstraction and demonstrates its unifying effects on the system's further development. Chapter 3, The Most Beautiful Code I Never Wrote, by Jon Bentley, suggests how to measure a procedure without actually executing it. Chapter 4, Finding Things, by Tim Bray, draws together many strands in Computer Science in an exploration of a problem that is fundamental to many computing tasks. Chapter 5, Correct, Beautiful, Fast (In That Order): Lessons From Designing XML Verifiers, by Elliotte Rusty Harold, reconciles the often conflicting goals of thoroughness and good performance. Chapter 6, Framework for Integrated Test: Beauty through Fragility, by Michael Feathers, presents an example that breaks the rules and achieves its own elegant solution. Chapter 7, Beautiful Tests, by Alberto Savoia, shows how a broad, creative approach to testing can not only eliminate bugs but turn you into a better programmer. Chapter 8, On-the-Fly Code Generation for Image Processing, by Charles Petzold, drops down a level to improve performance while maintaining portability. Chapter 9, Top-Down Operator Precedence, by Douglas Crockford, revives an almost forgotten parsing technique and shows its new relevance to the popular JavaScript language. Chapter 10, The Quest for an Accelerated Population Count, by Henry S. Warren, Jr., reveals the impact that some clever algorithms can have on even a seemingly simple problem. Chapter 11, Secure Communication: The Technology of Freedom, by Ashish Gulhati, discusses the directed evolution of a secure messaging application that was designed to make sophisticated but often confusing cryptographic technology intuitively accessible to users. Chapter 12, Growing Beautiful Code in BioPerl, by Lincoln Stein, shows how the combination of a flexible language and a custom-designed module can make it easy for people with modest programming skills to create powerful visualizations for their data. Chapter 13, The Design of the Gene Sorter, by Jim Kent, combines simple building blocks to produce a robust and valuable tool for gene researchers. Chapter 14, How Elegant Code Evolves With Hardware: The Case Of Gaussian Elimination, by Jack Dongarra and Piotr Luszczek, surveys the history of LINPACK and related major software packages, to show how assumptions must constantly be re-evaluated in the face of new computing architectures. Chapter 15, The Long-Term Benefits of Beautiful Design, by Adam Kolawa, explains how attention to good design principles many decades ago helped CERN's widely used mathematical library (the predecessor of LINPACK) stand the test of time. Chapter 16, The Linux Kernel Driver Model: The Benefits of Working Together, by Greg Kroah-Hartman, explains how many efforts by different collaborators to solve different problems led to the successful evolution of a complex, multithreaded system. Chapter 17, Another Level of Indirection, by Diomidis Spinellis, shows how the flexibility and maintainability of the FreeBSD kernel is promoted by abstracting operations done in common by many drivers and filesystem modules. Chapter 18, Python's Dictionary Implementation: Being All Things to All People, by Andrew Kuchling, explains how a careful design combined with accommodations for a few special cases allows a language feature to support many different uses. Chapter 19, Multi-Dimensional Iterators in NumPy, by Travis E. Oliphant, takes you through the design steps that succeed in hiding complexity under a simple interface. Chapter 20, A Highly Reliable Enterprise System for NASA's Mars Rover Mission, by Ronald Mak, uses industry standards, best practices, and Java technologies to meet the requirements of a NASA expedition where reliability cannot be in doubt. Chapter 21, ERP5: Designing for Maximum Adaptability, by Rogerio Atem de Carvalho and Rafael Monnerat, shows how a powerful ERP system can be developed with free software tools and a flexible architecture. Chapter 22, A Spoonful of Sewage, by Bryan Cantrill, lets the reader accompany the author through a hair-raising bug scare and a clever solution that violated expectations. Chapter 23, Distributed Programming with MapReduce, by Jeff Dean and Sanjay Ghemawat, describes a system that provides an easy-to-use programming abstraction for large-scale distributed data processing at Google that automatically handles many difficult aspects of distributed computation, including automatic parallelization, load balancing, and failure handling. Chapter 24, Beautiful Concurrency, by Simon Peyton Jones, removes much of the difficulty of parallel program through Software Transactional Memory, demonstrated here using Haskell. Chapter 25, Syntactic Abstraction: The syntax-case Expander, by Kent Dybvig, shows how macros-a key feature of many languages and systems-can be protected in Scheme from producing erroneous output. Chapter 26, Labor-Saving Architecture: An Object-Oriented Framework for Networked Software, by William Otte and Douglas C. Schmidt, applies a range of standard object-oriented design techniques, such as patterns and frameworks, to distributed logging to keep the system flexible and modular. Chapter 27, Integrating Business Partners the RESTful Way, by Andrew Patzer, demonstrates a designer's respect for his programmers by matching the design of a B2B web service to its requirements. Chapter 28, Beautiful Debugging, by Andreas Zeller, shows how a disciplined approach to validating code can reduce the time it takes to track down errors. Chapter 29, Treating Code as an Essay, by Yukihiro Matsumoto, lays out some challenging principles that drove his design of the Ruby programming language, and that, by extension, will help produce better software in general. Chapter 30, When a Button Is All That Connects You to the World, by Arun Mehta, takes you on a tour through the astounding interface design choices involved in a text editing system that allow people with severe motor disabilities, like Professor Stephen Hawking, to communicate via a computer. Chapter 31, Emacspeak: The Complete Audio Desktop, by TV Raman, shows how Lisp's advice facility can be used with Emacs to address a general need-generating rich spoken output-that cuts across all aspects of the Emacs environment, without modifying the underlying source code of a large software system. Chapter 32, Code in Motion, by Laura Wingerd and Christopher Seiwald, lists some simple rules that have unexpectedly strong impacts on programming accuracy. Chapter 33, Writing Programs for "The Book," by Brian Hayes, explores the frustrations of solving a seemingly simple problem in computational geometry, and its surprising resolution.

Visualizing Abstract Objects and Relations: A Constraint-Based Approach (Series in Computer Science)

Tomihisa Kamada — 2007-10-23T08:25:18-00:00

(30 November 1989)

Planar Graph Drawing (Lecture Notes Series on Computing)

Takao Nishizeki — 2007-03-31T01:25:00-00:00

(30 September 2004)

The book presents the important fundamental theorems and algorithms on planar graph drawing with easy-to-understand and constructive proofs. Extensively illustrated and with exercises included at the end of each chapter, it is suitable for use in advanced undergraduate and graduate level courses on algorithms, graph theory, graph drawing, information visualization and computational geometry. The book will also serve as a useful reference source for researchers in the field of graph drawing and software developers in information visualization, VLSI design and CAD.

An Experimental Comparison of Fast Algorithms for Drawing General Large Graphs

Stefan Hachul — 2007-10-23T08:16:38-00:00

(2006)

A multi-dimensional approach to force-directed layouts of large graphs

Pawel Gajer — 2005-06-20T22:41:00-00:00

Comput. Geom. Theory Appl., Vol. 29, No. 1. (September 2004), pp. 3-18.

Graphical Overview and Navigation of Electronic Health Records in a Prototyping Environment Using Google Earth and openEHR Archetypes.

E Sundvall — 2007-10-09T08:02:04-00:00

Stud Health Technol Inform, Vol. 129 (2007), pp. 1043-1047.

This paper describes selected earlier approaches to graphically relating events to each other and to time; some new combinations are also suggested. These are then combined into a unified prototyping environment for visualization and navigation of electronic health records. Google Earth (GE) is used for handling display and interaction of clinical information stored using openEHR data structures and 'archetypes'. The strength of the approach comes from GE's sophisticated handling of detail levels, from coarse overviews to fine-grained details that has been combined with linear, polar and region-based views of clinical events related to time. The system should be easy to learn since all the visualization styles can use the same navigation.The structured and multifaceted approach to handling time that is possible with archetyped openEHR data lends itself well to visualizing and integration with openEHR components is provided in the environment.

Representing and Reasoning on XForms Document

Peng Cheow — 2007-09-29T20:48:09-00:00

Vol. 27 (2004), pp. 141-150.

Effectiveness and efficiency of guideline dissemination and implementation strategies

2007-09-05T12:04:08-00:00

2D vs 3D, implications on spatial memory

M Tavanti — 2007-09-04T09:31:28-00:00

Information Visualization, 2001. INFOVIS 2001. IEEE Symposium on (2001), pp. 139-145.

The quality case for information technology in healthcare

David Bates — 2007-07-04T22:04:08-00:00

BMC Medical Informatics and Decision Making, Vol. 2, No. 1. (2002)

BACKGROUND:As described in the Institute of Medicine's Crossing the Quality Chasm report, the quality of health care in the U.S. today leaves much to be desired.DISCUSSION:One major opportunity for improving quality relates to increasing the use of information technology, or IT. Health care organizations currently invest less in IT than in any other information-intensive industry, and not surprisingly current systems are relatively primitive, compared with industries such as banking or aviation. Nonetheless, a number of organizations have demonstrated that quality can be substantially improved in a variety of ways if IT use is increased in ways that improve care. Specifically, computerization of processes that are error-prone and computerized decision support may substantially improve both efficiency and quality, as well as dramatically facilitate quality measurement. This report discusses the current levels of IT and quality in health care, how quality improvement and management are currently done, the evidence that more IT might be helpful, a vision of the future, and the barriers to getting there.SUMMARY:This report suggests that there are five key policy domains that need to be addressed: standards, incentives, security and confidentiality, professional involvement, and research, with financial incentives representing the single most important lever.

IT-adoption and the interaction of task, technology and individuals: a fit framework and a case study.

E Ammenwerth — 2006-03-02T03:25:00-00:00

BMC Med Inform Decis Mak, Vol. 6 (2006)

BACKGROUND: Factors of IT adoption have largely been discussed in the literature. However, existing frameworks (such as TAM or TTF) are failing to include one important aspect, the interaction between user and task. METHOD: Based on a literature study and a case study, we developed the FITT framework to help analyse the socio-organisational-technical factors that influence IT adoption in a health care setting. RESULTS: Our FITT framework ("Fit between Individuals, Task and Technology") is based on the idea that IT adoption in a clinical environment depends on the fit between the attributes of the individual users (e.g. computer anxiety, motivation), attributes of the technology (e.g. usability, functionality, performance), and attributes of the clinical tasks and processes (e.g. organisation, task complexity). We used this framework in the retrospective analysis of a three-year case study, describing the adoption of a nursing documentation system in various departments in a German University Hospital. We will show how the FITT framework helped analyzing the process of IT adoption during an IT implementation: we were able to describe every found IT adoption problem with regard to the three fit dimensions, and any intervention on the fit can be described with regard to the three objects of the FITT framework (individual, task, technology). We also derive facilitators and barriers to IT adoption of clinical information systems. CONCLUSION: This work should support a better understanding of the reasons for IT adoption failures and therefore enable better prepared and more successful IT introduction projects. We will discuss, however, that from a more epistemological point of view, it may be difficult or even impossible to analyse the complex and interacting factors that predict success or failure of IT projects in a socio-technical environment.

Ten commandments for effective clinical decision support: making the practice of evidence-based medicine a reality.

DW Bates — 2007-05-22T11:20:18-00:00

J Am Med Inform Assoc, Vol. 10, No. 6. (c 2003), pp. 523-530.

While evidence-based medicine has increasingly broad-based support in health care, it remains difficult to get physicians to actually practice it. Across most domains in medicine, practice has lagged behind knowledge by at least several years. The authors believe that the key tools for closing this gap will be information systems that provide decision support to users at the time they make decisions, which should result in improved quality of care. Furthermore, providers make many errors, and clinical decision support can be useful for finding and preventing such errors. Over the last eight years the authors have implemented and studied the impact of decision support across a broad array of domains and have found a number of common elements important to success. The goal of this report is to discuss these lessons learned in the interest of informing the efforts of others working to make the practice of evidence-based medicine a reality.

Improving Information Technology Adoption and Implementation Through the Identification of Appropriate Benefits: Creating IMPROVE-IT

Kevin Leonard — 2007-05-22T10:41:31-00:00

J Med Internet Res, Vol. 9, No. 2. (May 2007)

This paper describes the objectives of a collaborative initiative that attempts to provide the evidence that increased information technology (IT) capabilities, availability, and use lead directly to improved clinical quality, safety, and effectiveness within the inpatient hospital setting. This collaborative network has defined specific measurement indicators in an attempt to examine the existence, timing, and level of improvements in health outcomes that can be derived from IT investment. These indicators are in three areas: (1) IT costs (which includes both initial and ongoing investment), (2) IT infusion (ie, system availability, adoption, and deployment), and (3) health performance (eg, clinical efficacy, efficiency, quality, and effectiveness). Herein, we outline the theoretical framework, the methodology employed to create the metrics, and the benefits that can be obtained.

Scientific American: Breaking Network Logjams

2007-05-22T07:51:45-00:00

HL7 Clinical Document Architecture, Release 2.

RH Dolin — 2007-02-24T19:00:43-00:00

J Am Med Inform Assoc, Vol. 13, No. 1. (b 2006), pp. 30-39.

Clinical Document Architecture, Release One (CDA R1), became an American National Standards Institute (ANSI)-approved HL7 Standard in November 2000, representing the first specification derived from the Health Level 7 (HL7) Reference Information Model (RIM). CDA, Release Two (CDA R2), became an ANSI-approved HL7 Standard in May 2005 and is the subject of this article, where the focus is primarily on how the standard has evolved since CDA R1, particularly in the area of semantic representation of clinical events. CDA is a document markup standard that specifies the structure and semantics of a clinical document (such as a discharge summary or progress note) for the purpose of exchange. A CDA document is a defined and complete information object that can include text, images, sounds, and other multimedia content. It can be transferred within a message and can exist independently, outside the transferring message. CDA documents are encoded in Extensible Markup Language (XML), and they derive their machine processable meaning from the RIM, coupled with terminology. The CDA R2 model is richly expressive, enabling the formal representation of clinical statements (such as observations, medication administrations, and adverse events) such that they can be interpreted and acted upon by a computer. On the other hand, CDA R2 offers a low bar for adoption, providing a mechanism for simply wrapping a non-XML document with the CDA header or for creating a document with a structured header and sections containing only narrative content. The intent is to facilitate widespread adoption, while providing a mechanism for incremental semantic interoperability.

Interface Culture : How New Technology Transforms the Way We Create and Communicate

Steven Johnson — 2005-05-17T10:35:31-00:00

(06 October 1999)

Publishing perishing? Towards tomorrow's information architecture

Michael Seringhaus — 2007-01-20T17:59:35-00:00

BMC Bioinformatics, Vol. 8 (19 January 2007), 17.

Lifestreams: a storage model for personal data

Eric Freeman — 2005-11-18T08:05:35-00:00

SIGMOD Rec., Vol. 25, No. 1. (March 1996), pp. 80-86.

Visualization Handbook

Charles Hansen — 2005-11-03T22:54:48-00:00

(31 December 2004)

The Visualization Handbook provides an overview of the field of visualization by presenting the basic concepts, providing a snapshot of current visualization software systems, and examining research topics that are advancing the field. This text is intended for a broad audience, including not only the visualization expert seeking advanced methods to solve a particular problem, but also the novice looking for general background information on visualization topics. The largest collection of state-of-the-art visualization research yet gathered in a single volume, this book includes articles by a whos who of international scientific visualization researchers covering every aspect of the discipline, including: · Virtual environments for visualization · Basic visualization algorithms · Large-scale data visualization · Scalar data isosurface methods · Visualization software and frameworks · Scalar data volume rendering · Perceptual issues in visualization · Various application topics, including information visualization. * Edited by two of the best known people in the world on the subject; chapter authors are authoritative experts in their own fields; * Covers a wide range of topics, in 47 chapters, representing the state-of-the-art of scientific visualization. Visualization involves constructing graphical interfaces that enable humans to understand complex data sets; it helps humans overcome their natural limitations in terms of extracting knowledge from the massive volumes of data that are now routinely connected. The best argument for scientific visualization is that today's researchers must consume ever higher volumes of numbers that gush, as if from a fire hose, out of supercomputer simulations or high-powered scientific instruments. If researchers try to read the data, usually presented as vast numeric matrices, they will take in the information at snail's pace. If the information is rendered graphically, however, they can assimilate it at a much faster rate Rapid advances in 3-D scientific visualization have made a major impact on the display of data/information.

Cluster and Calendar Based Visualization of Time Series Data

Jarke Van Wijk — 2005-06-13T20:28:59-00:00

(1999)

Experiences from development of home health care applications based on emerging Java technology.

L Lind — 2007-02-02T08:40:42-00:00

Medinfo, Vol. 10, No. Pt 1. (2001), pp. 830-834.

Home health care is an expanding area within the health care system. The idea of moving parts of the health care process from expensive specialised hospital care to primary health care and home health care might be attractive in a cost perspective. The introduction of home health care applications must be based on a rigorous analysis of necessary requirements to secure a safe and reliable health care. This article reports early experiences from the development of a home health care application based on emerging Java technologies such as the OSGi platform. A pilot application for follow-up of diabetes patients is presented and discussed in relation to a list of general requirements on home health care applications.

An approach for generating fuzzy rules from decision trees.

AR Razavi — 2007-02-02T08:12:24-00:00

Stud Health Technol Inform, Vol. 124 (2006), pp. 581-586.

Identifying high-risk breast cancer patients is vital both for clinicians and for patients. Some variables for identifying these patients such as tumor size are good candidates for fuzzification. In this study, Decision Tree Induction (DTI) has been applied to 3949 female breast cancer patients and crisp If-Then rules has been acquired from the resulting tree. After assigning membership functions for each variable in the crisp rules, they were converted into fuzzy rules and a mathematical model was constructed. One hundred randomly selected cases were examined by this model and compared with crisp rules predictions. The outcomes were examined by the area under the ROC curve (AUC). No significant difference was noticed between these two approaches for prediction of recurrence of breast cancer. By soft discretization of variables according to resulting rules from DTI, a predictive model, which is both more robust to noise and more comprehensible for clinicians, can be built.

Ontological Engineering for Interpreting Geospatial Queries

Peachavanish — 2007-01-15T20:06:56-00:00

Transactions in GIS, Vol. 11, No. 1. (February 2007), pp. 115-130.

Requirements and prototyping of a home health care application based on emerging JAVA technology.

L Lind — 2006-12-14T22:19:13-00:00

Int J Med Inform, Vol. 68, No. 1-3. (18 December 2002), pp. 129-139.

IT support for home health care is an expanding area within health care IT development. Home health care differs from other in- or outpatient care delivery forms in a number of ways, and thus, the introduction of home health care applications must be based on a rigorous analysis of necessary requirements to secure safe and reliable health care. This article reports early experiences from the development of a home health care application based on emerging JAVA technologies. A prototype application for the follow-up of diabetes patients is presented and discussed in relation to a list of general requirements on home health care applications.

Interactive visualization and navigation of complex terminology systems, exemplified by SNOMED CT.

E Sundvall — 2006-12-14T22:17:17-00:00

Stud Health Technol Inform, Vol. 124 (2006), pp. 851-856.

Free-text queries are natural entries into the exploration of complex terminology systems. The way search results are presented has impact on the user's ability to grasp the overall structure of the system. Complex hierarchies like the one used in SNOMED CT, where nodes have multiple parents (IS-A) and several other relationship types, makes visualization challenging. This paper presents a prototype, TermViz, applying well known methods like "focus+context" and self-organizing layouts from the fields of Information Visualization and Graph Drawing to terminologies like SNOMED CT and ICD-10. The user can simultaneously focus on several nodes in the terminologies and then use interactive animated graph navigation and semantic zooming to further explore the terminology systems without loosing context. The prototype, based on Open Source Java components, demonstrates how a number of Information Visualisation methods can aid the exploration of medical terminologies with millions of elements and can serve as a base for further development.

Logic programming in the context of multiparadigm programming: the Oz experience

P Van Roy — 2005-09-17T10:07:08-00:00

Oz is a multiparadigm language that supports logic programming as one of its major paradigms. A multiparadigm language is designed to support dierent programming paradigms (logic, functional, constraint, object-oriented, sequential, concurrent, etc.) with equal ease. This article has two goals: to give a tutorial of logic programming in Oz and to show how logic programming ts naturally into the wider context of multiparadigm programming. Our experience shows that there are two classes of ...

The pragmatic web: a manifesto

Mareike Schoop — 2006-05-20T10:42:57-00:00

Commun. ACM, Vol. 49, No. 5. (May 2006), pp. 75-76.

Integration of Tools for Binding Archetypes to SNOMED CT

Erik Sundvall — 2006-12-05T15:05:56-00:00

(1-3 October 2006), pp. 64-68.

Towards Semantic Interoperability for Electronic Health Records: Domain Knowledge Governance for openEHR Archetypes.

S Garde — 2006-12-05T15:01:00-00:00

Methods of Information in Medicine (2007)

The PEN&PAD data entry system: from prototype to practical system.

J Kirby — 2006-12-05T14:52:07-00:00

Proc AMIA Annu Fall Symp (1996), pp. 709-713.

This paper describes some of the issues addressed in the transition of the PEN&PAD from prototype clinical workstation to practical data entry system for use by general practitioners in the UK. Background and motivation of the PEN&PAD and GALEN projects are presented before the operation of the PEN&PAD user interface is described. A number of issues which have arisen in the development of the PEN&PAD Data Entry System are discussed.