The Informatics Review Vol. 6 No. 1 - Jan 1 2003 -- Current Reviews in Clinical Informatics

Health care in the information society. A prognosis for the year 2013
Three major goals requiring achievement have been identified:
* Patient-centered recording and use of medical data for cooperative care,
* Process-integrated decision support through current medical knowledge, and
* Comprehensive use of patient data for research and health care reporting.

Institute for Medical Knowledge Interchange (IMKI) announces launch of web-based authoring tool for clinical decision support
IMKI is beta-testing a web-based authoring tool that allows clinicians without significant technical expertise to write clinical decision support rules. The authoring tool provides a user-friendly environment where authors define clinical populations and assign action steps to patients who meet the designated criteria. The application translates these algorithms
into a computer language that can be exported into the rules execution engine of major information systems. Uploaded rules are delivered to the point-of-care in the form of computerized alerts and reminders.

New EU guidelines for e-health websites
The over-arching principle is that a health-related website must state clearly its target audience and take care to "ensure that both the style and nature of the information, and its presentation, are appropriate for the chosen audience". The top-level criteria, designed to be applicable irrespective of the type of information or the audience being addressed, are identified as: transparency and honesty; authority - requiring content providers to state their credentials; privacy and data protection; updating of information; accountability (setting out editorial policy and addressing responsible partnerships) and accessibility.

Internet support groups for depression: a 1-year prospective cohort study
Users had high depression severity scores, were socially isolated, and perceived considerable benefit from the group. Internet depression support groups warrant continued research regarding supplementation of face-to-face depression care.

Third Annual Privacy Summit -- Implementing and Managing Privacy in a Complex Environment, February 26-28, 2003 in Washington, D.C.
The complexities of privacy have permeated the full breadth of corporate America. Now, more than ever, privacy professionals - and other professionals who deal with privacy concerns as a portion of their responsibilities - need comprehensive and practical training targeted to their industry.

Ca:sh (Community Access to Sustainable Health) is an MIT Media Lab Asia project for investigating how information technology can be used to improve rural healthcare in an economically sustainable manner. This web site has been set up to support continued development of a medical informatics software package that is currently being used in a pilot study outside New Delhi, India.

The Dollars and Sense of Electronic Medical Records
This publication explores the question. Do electronic medical records make sense from a business perspective? They look at four specific categories within a medical office where an EMR can make a significant improvement:
* Cost Reduction
* Revenue Enhancement
* Improved Administrative Efficiency
* Improved Clinical Efficiency

Measuring agreement in medical informatics reliability studies
Approaches based on modeling the decision making process can be helpful, including tetrachoric correlation, polychoric correlation, latent trait models, and latent class models. Decision making models can also be used to better understand the behavior of different agreement metrics. For example, if the observed prevalence of responses in one of two available categories is low, then there is insufficient information in the sample to judge raters' ability to discriminate cases, and kappa may underestimate the true agreement and observed agreement may overestimate it.

Drugref.org - Free Pharmaceutical Reference
Their intention is to create and maintain a free pharmaceutical reference database. They intend to achieve this through collaborative authorship and peer review. Anybody with a suitable academic background (medical doctor, pharmacologist, biochemist etc.) is welcome to join. The database is multinational. The authors can specify for which country and/or language any particular information is valid.

Evaluation of inherent performance of intelligent medical decision support systems: utilising neural networks as an example
This paper aims to address this issue by concentrating on the possible evaluation methodology, giving a framework and specific suggestions for each type of classification problem. This should allow the developers of intelligent systems to produce evidence of a sufficiency of output performance evaluation.

Papyrus to PowerPoint (P 2 P): metamorphosis of scientific communication
Summary points:
* Traditional peer reviewed journals are becoming obsolete
* We are experiencing a dramatic metamorphosis of the tools of scientific communication
* The prima lingua of scientific communication is PowerPoint
* Our search for the optimal information exchange method in science leads to P2P

Wired Communities: Putting the E in Public Health
will air Friday, January 31, 2003, at 2:00 - 3:00 pm Eastern Time. Join them as they share the vision of Blacksburg, Virginia, a community that is improving the practice of public health by building relationships, investing in information technology, and communicating with the world.
Other issues from Volume 6 -- 2001

1 -- Jan 1

5 -- Mar 1

9 --- May 1

13 -- Jul 1

17 -- Sep 1

21 -- Nov 1

2 -- Jan 15

6 -- Mar 15

10 -- May 15

14 -- Jul 15

18 -- Sep 15

22 -- Nov 15

3 -- Feb 1

7 -- Apr 1

11 -- Jun 1

15 -- Aug 1

19 -- Oct 1

23 -- Dec 1

4 -- Feb 15

8 -- Apr 15

12 -- Jun 15

16 -- Aug 15

20 -- Oct 15

24 -- Dec 15

1/1/03 dfs

1 -- Jan 1	5 -- Mar 1	9 --- May 1	13 -- Jul 1	17 -- Sep 1	21 -- Nov 1
2 -- Jan 15	6 -- Mar 15	10 -- May 15	14 -- Jul 15	18 -- Sep 15	22 -- Nov 15
3 -- Feb 1	7 -- Apr 1	11 -- Jun 1	15 -- Aug 1	19 -- Oct 1	23 -- Dec 1
4 -- Feb 15	8 -- Apr 15	12 -- Jun 15	16 -- Aug 15	20 -- Oct 15	24 -- Dec 15