Traditional electronic health record (EHR) data are produced from various hospital information systems. They could not have existed independently without an information system until the incarnation of XML technology. The interoperability of a healthcare system can be divided into two dimensions: functional interoperability and semantic interoperability. Currently, no single EHR standard exists ...

Integration of Clinical Practice Guidelines (CPGs) within Electronic Health Record (EHR) systems improves dissemination, implementation, and effective enactment of CPGs in the organizational workflow, but requires that some inherent contrasts be faced. On the one hand, tailoring the EHR structure so as to fit a restricted set of CPGs induces a bias towards specific pathologies. On the other han...

By June 2013, three fourths of office-based practicing physicians in the United States had adopted some form of electronic health record (EHR) system. With greater EHR use, more health data are linked with available patient demographic information in a format that is easily retrievable and collected at the point of care. This highlights the potential of electronic clinical quality measure (CQM)...

The debate regarding potential negative health effects of electronic nicotine delivery systems (ENDS), which include electronic cigarettes, has received much recent attention. Currently, it is unknown whether ENDS pose a real health risk to users or those passively exposed to their vapor. With the increased use of these devices, the goal of this study was to examine if and how their use is bein...

Hospitals and physicians' practices are rapidly implementing the electronic health record (EHR) because it offers many demonstrated advantages over paper records. Issues of misuse of the EHR previously identified include breaches in confidentiality and privacy and inappropriate record sharing. I describe a separate set of ethical and quality problems of the EHR that result from its otherwise be...

As interest in the reuse of electronic health record (EHR) data for research purposes grows, so too does awareness of the significant data quality problems in these non-traditional datasets. In the past, however, little attention has been paid to whether poor data quality merely introduces noise into EHR-derived datasets, or if there is potential for the creation of spurious signals and bias. I...

Usability testing is increasingly being recognized as a way to increase the usability and safety of health information technology (HIT). Medical simulation centers can serve as testing environments for HIT usability studies. We integrated the quality assurance version of our emergency department (ED) electronic health record (EHR) into our medical simulation center and piloted a clinical care s...

Metformin is a first-line antihyperglycemic agent commonly prescribed in type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM), but whose pharmacogenomics are not clearly understood. Further, due to accumulating evidence highlighting the potential for metformin in cancer prevention and treatment efforts it is imperative to understand molecular mechanisms of metformin. In this electronic health record(EHR)-based stud...

This study describes the current status of computerization for hospitals and makes various recommendations to improve the level of computerization and information sharing between hospitals in order to strengthen the National Health Information System (NHIS). According to a survey of 314 out of 1,289 hospitals in August 2005, the computerization level was higher for the specialty tertiary hospit...