Unsecured email sparks dispute
Austin Health, a large hospital in Melbourne Australia, has been emailing discharge summaries to patients' GPs instead of sending them by fax or post, following a decision by the hospital's privacy committee that the benefits of rapid communication outweighed the risks to patient confidentiality.

Computer-Assisted Coding Software Standards Workshop -- September 6-8, 2006 -- Arlington, VA
This workshop is being held to develop recommendations on standards for computer-assisted coding. The aims of the workshop are to:

Obstetrics Patient Safety Forum
Oregon's State Obstetric & Pediatric Research Collaboration (STORC) has established this secure web site to provide a safe place to encourage collaboration and sharing of information among clinicians, investigators, healthcare personnel, and educators. This site is completely independent, with no connections to any institutional or commercial database systems to assure the security and privacy of data. Individuals can access this secure internet site for anonymous reporting of errors, near-miss errors and adverse events.

Extracting principal diagnosis, co-morbidity and smoking status for asthma research: evaluation of a natural language processing system
The text descriptions in electronic medical records are a rich source of information. We have developed a Health Information Text Extraction (HITEx) tool and used it to extract key findings for a research study on airways disease. The accuracy of HITEx was 82% for principal diagnosis, 87% for co-morbidity, and 89% for smoking status extraction, when cases labeled Insufficient Data by the gold standard were excluded.

Structured data entry for narrative data in a broad specialty: patient history and physical examination in pediatrics
An EMR system allowing structured recording (OpenSDE) of pediatric narrative data was developed. Patient history is described by 20 main concepts and physical examination by 11. In total, the thesaurus consists of about 1800 items, used in 8648 nodes in the tree with a maximum depth of 9 levels. Patient history contained 6312 nodes, and physical examination 2336. User-defined entry forms can be composed according to individual needs, without affecting the underlying data representation. The tree structure for general pediatrics is available at the Erasmus MC Web site (in Dutch, translation into English in progress)

Use of computerized decision support systems to improve antibiotic prescribing
This review describes computerized decision support systems used to assist with antibiotic prescribing, the evidence for their effectiveness and the current and future roles.

The need for organizational change in patient safety initiatives
Results of the analysis indicate that improved patient safety requires more than clinical initiatives and voluntary reporting of errors. In order to be successful, these initiatives must be designed and implemented through organizational support structures and institutionalized through enhanced education, training, and implementation of information technology that improves work flow capabilities.