Oregen Health & Science University Department of Medical Informatics and Clinical Epidemiology is having a Prospective Students' Open House
Interested in a cutting-edge career combining Information Technology with Healthcare or Biomedical research? If you're searching for a nationally recognized graduate program in Biomedical Informatics, mark your calendars for the first ever Biomedical Informatics Graduate Program Open House, Saturday, November 4, 2006 from 11:30 AM - 3:00 PM.

Pacific Edge E-Health Innovations: Linking Research, Practice and Policy to Benefit Consumers and Communities
The Annual Kay-CGU Symposium brings together pioneering researchers, educators, and practitioners in a collaborative forum aimed at advancing knowledge, research, and policy recommendations within electronic health and disability realms. This year we will feature experts from across the “Pacific Edge”, providing a regional flavor on innovation while at the same time maintaining the symposium’s national reach.

Awards recognize N.Y., Texas info-sharing programs
Texas and New York public health systems each received a 2006 Davies Award of Excellence, given each year to health care providers that can show particularly successful implementations of electronic health record (EHR) programs.

What interventions should pharmacists employ to impact health practitioners' prescribing practices?
Interventions that are most effective for impacting prescribing practice include audit and feedback, reminders, educational outreach visits, and patient-mediated interventions. To maximize impact, pharmacists' efforts to positively impact prescribing practices should focus on these intervention types rather than relying primarily on passive didactics or dissemination of guidelines.

Would artificial neural networks implemented in clinical wards help nephrologists in predicting epoetin responsiveness? YES!
Computer-Interpretable Clinical Practice Guidelines (CIG) systems are in a state of evolution. Standards efforts promise to improve interoperability without compromising innovation. The Virtual Medical Record (VMR) concept can assist guideline development even before clinical systems routinely adhere to standards. Frontiers for future work include using the principles learned by computer implementation of guidelines to improve the guideline development process and evaluation methods that isolate the effects of specific CIG features.

Computer-Interpretable Clinical Practice Guidelines - Where are we and where are we going?
For a specificity of 50%, the sensitivity of ANNs compared with linear regressions in predicting the erythropoietin dose to reach the haemoglobin target was 78 vs. 44% (P < 0.001). The ANN built to predict the monthly adaptations in erythropoietin dose, compared with the nephrologists' opinion, allowed to detect 48 vs. 25% (P < 0.05) of the patients treated with an insufficient dose with a specificity of 92 vs. 83% (P < 0.05).