Grand Challenges in Medical Informatics
A tentative list of Grand Challenges in Medical Informatics. Click to view or better yet, add a new one of your own!

Case Study: Data Repository Gets to the Heart of Quality Improvement
BCBSM's Cardiovascular Consortium Angioplasty Continuous Quality Improvement Project created a statewide data registry for angioplasty procedures that helped lower mortality rates and save participating hospitals $8 million annually. Project leaders are now exploring the possibility of expanding the data repository for other conditions and procedures.

A Better Ebook?
Unlike previous Ebooks, this 1/2-inch thick Librié with its 6-inch diagonal screen does not use power-hungry LCD technology, but uses a specialized display from E-Ink. It's composed of thousands of tiny colored beads, some black (negatively charged) and some white (positively charged), in an opaque solution (170 pixels per inch, or newspaper-like quality). The screen is viewable from any angle, and what's particularly significant is that the screen retains its image "forever" without using ANY battery power; it only requires power to CHANGE the image, leading to an expected life of 10,000 pages before having to replace the three AAA batteries!

I Think, Therefore I Do
An array of up to 320 hair-thin electrodes were implanted in monkeys' brains. The electrodes communicated the electrical activity at each site to a computer which then analyzed the activity as the monkeys played a typical joystick-controlled computer game. Once the computer had correlated the brains' electrical activity to the arms' muscle movements, the input from the physical joystick was cut off while the computer replaced that signal with those "processed" signals emanating directly from the monkeys' brains. At that point, the monkeys' were playing the game totally by thought-control!

The Canadian Adverse Events Study: the incidence of adverse events among hospital patients in Canada
It's not just the USA anymore! The overall incidence rate of AEs of 7.5% in our study suggests that, of the almost 2.5 million annual hospital admissions in Canada similar to the type studied, about 185 000 are associated with an AE and close to 70 000 of these are potentially preventable.

Anytime, Anywhere Medical Records: The National Health Information Infrastructure (NHII)
If it is correct that the road to the NHII leads through LHIIs, then it will be essential to develop a road-based process in Oregon. Hoping to build on the state’s history of collaboration in healthcare quality and data sharing, a group attending the NHII meeting has decided to pursue this agenda locally. The OHII Web sitewill soon be the best place for up-to-date information about this rapidly moving process.

Learning from e-patients at Massachusetts General Hospital
After nearly a decade of e-patient research, we've concluded that what e-patients actually do on line is more complex—and more social—than most health professionals realise. Much of what we have learnt in our collaborations with e-patients can be summed up in what has come to be known as Lester's law: "Medical knowledge is a social process: the conversations that occur around artefactual data are always more important than the data themselves."

A Wireless Health Outcomes Monitoring System (WHOMS): development and field testing with cancer patients using mobile phones
Of the 97 patients, 56 (58%) attempted the questionnaire, and all of these 56 completed it. Only 6% of the total number of questions were left unanswered by patients. Forty-one (42%) patients refused to participate, mostly due to their lack of familiarity with mobile phone use. Compared with those who completed the questionnaire, patients who refused to participate were older, had fewer years of education and were less familiar with new communications technology (mobile phone calls, mobile phone SMS, internet, email).

Task-oriented evaluation of electronic medical records systems: development and validation of a questionnaire for physicians
We have developed a task-oriented questionnaire for evaluating EMR systems from the clinician's perspective. The key feature of the questionnaire is a list of 24 general clinical tasks. It is applicable to physicians of most specialties and covers essential parts of their information-oriented work. The task list appears in two separate sections, about EMR use and task performance using the EMR, respectively. By combining these sections, the evaluator may estimate the potential impact of the EMR system on health care delivery. The results may also be compared across time, site or vendor.

2nd International Conference on the Clinical Document Architecture
Building on the success of the first International Conference on the CDA held in Berlin two years ago, the Acapulco meeting will bring together the expanding CDA user base with standards developers, tools designers and researchers for further exploration of this specification for clinical documents.

Systematic Review: Surveillance Systems for Early Detection of Bioterrorism-Related Diseases
The practice of surveillance is changing to address the threat of bioterrorism and to take advantage of the increasing availability of electronic data. The authors identified published descriptions of 29 systems designed specifically for bioterrorism surveillance. Only 2 syndromic surveillance systems and no environmental monitoring system were evaluated in peer-reviewed studies. Evaluation of bioterrorism surveillance is needed to inform decisions about deploying systems and to facilitate decision making on the basis of system results.