US conference gets a reality check on the United Kingdom's National Programme for IT (NPfIT)
In a keynote address at the 22nd annual Towards an Electronic Patient Record (TEPR) conference in Baltimore, MD, Phil Sissons, former National Programme for IT industry liaison manager and now an ICT consultant said that there was a lot of truth in the negative reports about Connecting for Health (CfH), the agency running the National Programme for IT (NPfIT), despite the frequent denials by NHS officials.

The impact of prescribing safety alerts for elderly persons in an electronic medical record: an interrupted time series evaluation
Following the implementation of the drug-specific alerts, a large and persistent reduction (5.1 prescriptions per 10 000, P=.004), a 22% relative decrease from the month before alert implementation, in the exposure of elderly patients to nonpreferred medications was observed. We found no evidence of a decrease in use of nonpreferred agents for nonelderly patients.

Identifying Asthma Exacerbations in Pediatric Patients Using Electronically Available Data from Clinical Information Systems
A problem list was available in 203 (55.2%) patients and an ICD-9 code for asthma in 68 (18.5%) patients. Fever was the most frequent chief complaint in the study group (43.8%), while wheezing accounted for 56.5% of asthma visits. The detection algorithm had a sensitivity of 74.0% (95% confidence interval [95% CI]: 67.1%-81.0%), a specificity of 89.7% (CI: 85.7%-93.8%), a positive predictive value of 83.8% (CI: 77.6%-90.0%), and a negative predictive value of 82.8% (CI: 77.9%-87.6%). The positive and negative likelihood ratios were 7.2 and 0.29. The simple identification algorithm demonstrated good accuracy for identifying asthma episodes and may be used to generate computerized reminders or initiate guideline-based asthma treatment protocols.

Evaluation of PROforma as a language for implementing medical guidelines in a practical context
The experience accumulated during this study highlighted the importance of structure preserving design, that is to say that the models used in the design and implementation of a knowledge-based system should be structurally similar to those created during knowledge acquisition and analysis. Ideally the same language should be used for all of these models. This means that great importance has to be attached to the notational convenience of these languages, by which we mean the ease with which they can be read, written, and understood by human beings.

Healthcare Services Specification Project Overview
This project is a collaborative effort between Health Level Seven [http://www.hl7.org] and the Object Management Group [http://www.omg.org] to identify and document service specifications, functionality, and conformance supportive and relevant to healthcare IT stakeholders and resulting in real-world implementations. In addition, several other groups have joined the HSSP effort. The Eclipse Foundation Open Healthcare Framework [http://www.eclipse.org/ohf/|] and the Medical Banking Project [http://www.mbproject.org] have each committed support to this project and are participating.

Clinical computing in general dentistry
Clinical computing is being increasingly adopted in general dentistry. However, future research must address usefulness and ease of use, workflow support, infection control, integration, and implementation issues.

Health Care Spending and Use of Information Technology in OECD Countries
U.S. health spending per capita significantly and consistently outpaces that of other industrialized nations. One proposal for lowering health spending and improving quality is the adoption of health information technology (HIT). Yet the United States lags behind other countries by as much as a dozen years in its efforts to implement HIT. Heeding lessons from other countries' experiences with HIT development could facilitate U.S. implementation.

Use of handheld computers in medical education. A systematic review
Approximately 60% to 70% of medical students and residents use PDAs for educational purposes or patient care. Satisfaction was generally high and correlated with the level of handheld computer experience. Most of the studies included described PDA use for patient tracking and documentation. By contrast, trainees rated medical textbooks, medication references, and medical calculators as the most useful applications.