Canada Health Infoway (Infoway) was launched in 2001 following an agreement by Canada’s First Ministers to strengthen a Canada-wide health infostructure that would include the development and benefits of electronic healthcare solutions. With a goal to have an electronic health record (EHR) for 50% of all Canadians by population by 2010, Infoway is investing in some key areas of health informati...

BACKGROUND Structured data entry pervades computerized patient safety event reporting systems and serves as a key component in collecting patient-related information in electronic health records. Clinicians would spend more time being with patients and arrive at a high probability of proper diagnosis and treatment, if data entry can be completed efficiently and effectively. Historically it has ...

BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE Primary care practice-based research has become more complex with increased use of electronic health records (EHRs). Little has been reported about changes in study planning and execution that are required as practices change from paper-based to electronic-based environments. We describe the evolution of a pediatric practice-based intervention study as it was adapted for ...

Timely detection of concerning events is an important problem in clinical practice. In this paper, we consider the problem of conditional anomaly detection that aims to identify data instances with an unusual response, such as the omission of an important lab test. We develop a new non-parametric approach for conditional anomaly detection based on the soft harmonic solution, with which we estim...

OBJECTIVES Issues related to lack of system usability and potential safety hazards continue to be reported in the health information technology (HIT) literature. Usability engineering methods are increasingly used to ensure improved system usability and they are also beginning to be applied more widely for ensuring the safety of HIT applications. These methods are being used in the design and i...

BACKGROUND Personal health records (PHRs) are increasingly being deployed worldwide, but their rates of adoption by patients vary widely across countries and health systems. Five main categories of adopters are usually considered when evaluating the diffusion of innovations: innovators, early adopters, early majority, late majority, and laggards. OBJECTIVE We aimed to evaluate adoption of the...

Personalized predictive models are customized for an individual patient and trained using information from similar patients. Compared to global models trained on all patients, they have the potential to produce more accurate risk scores and capture more relevant risk factors for individual patients. This paper presents an approach for building personalized predictive models and generating perso...

Effective nurse shift-to-shift handover is a prerequisite for high-quality inpatient care. Combining person-centeredness with the need for improved handover rituals, we introduced and evaluated person-centered handover (PCH) in an oncological inpatient setting. PCH is the shift-to-shift nursing report performed together with the patient according to a set structure focused on patient participat...

BACKGROUND This study compares general practitioners (GPs) and general practice trainees (GPTs) on the adaptation to the electronic health records (EHRs) and how they perceive its impact on medical consultations. METHODS Cross-sectional, descriptive study. The link for an online questionnaire was sent to mainland Portuguese health care centre groups. RESULTS A total of 147 physicians (100 f...

BACKGROUND Missing data is a challenge for all studies; however, this is especially true for electronic health record (EHR)-based analyses. Failure to appropriately consider missing data can lead to biased results. While there has been extensive theoretical work on imputation, and many sophisticated methods are now available, it remains quite challenging for researchers to implement these metho...