ABSTRACT
BACKGROUND: As America's baby boom generation reaches retirement, the number of elders, and, in turn, the number of lay individuals who support them, will continue to increase. With the important services caregivers provide, it is critical that we recognize and provide assistance to the informal caregivers who play this important role in our society. The network of support provisioned by relatives, partners, friends, and neighbors suggests that the dyadic, unidirectional caregiver-care recipient relationship assumed by caregiver research so far and by resources deployed to assist caregivers may be insufficient to ascertain and meet the needs of the care community. METHODS: In this article, we describe the extension of a Web-based personal health record system, iHealthSpace, for explicitly and openly incorporating caregivers into the care community. RESULTS: Using this portal, a set of business rules was implemented to support the creation of custodial accounts. These business rules will be used to create modules that support diabetes care in an adult population. CONCLUSIONS: We successfully extended an existing patient portal to accommodate the creation of custodial accounts. We will use this portal to assess the impact of custodial access in the care of older patients with diabetes.
Subject(s)
Caregivers , Diabetes Mellitus/therapy , Health Records, Personal , Internet , Personal Health Services/organization & administration , Personal Space , Adult , Caregivers/organization & administration , Health , Health Services Needs and Demand/organization & administration , Humans , Models, Biological , Pilot Projects , Self-Help Groups , User-Computer InterfaceABSTRACT
SemanticDx is a web based clinical decision support system (CDSS) that uses a semantic web framework to integrate a knowledge base, DXplain, with a diagnostic tests sensitivity and specificity and patient demographic data to provide patient-specific positive and negative predictive values at the point of care.
Subject(s)
Artificial Intelligence , Data Interpretation, Statistical , Decision Support Systems, Clinical/organization & administration , Decision Support Techniques , Diagnosis, Computer-Assisted/methods , Point-of-Care Systems/organization & administration , Software , Boston , SemanticsABSTRACT
This report presents an overview for pathologists of the development and potential applications of a novel Web enabled system allowing indexing and retrieval of pathology specimens across multiple institutions. The system was developed through the National Cancer Institute's Shared Pathology Informatics Network program with the goal of creating a prototype system to find existing pathology specimens derived from routine surgical and autopsy procedures ("paraffin blocks") that may be relevant to cancer research. To reach this goal, a number of challenges needed to be met. A central aspect was the development of an informatics system that supported Web-based searching while retaining local control of data. Additional aspects included the development of an eXtensible Markup Language schema, representation of tissue specimen annotation, methods for deidentifying pathology reports, tools for autocoding critical data from these reports using the Unified Medical Language System, and hierarchies of confidentiality and consent that met or exceeded federal requirements. The prototype system supported Web-based querying of millions of pathology reports from 6 participating institutions across the country in a matter of seconds to minutes and the ability of bona fide researchers to identify and potentially to request specific paraffin blocks from the participating institutions. With the addition of associated clinical and outcome information, this system could vastly expand the pool of annotated tissues available for cancer research as well as other diseases.
Subject(s)
Medical Informatics/organization & administration , Pathology, Surgical/organization & administration , Specimen Handling/methods , Tissue Banks , Humans , United StatesABSTRACT
The Informatics for Integrating Biology and the Bedside (i2b2) is one of the sponsored initiatives of the NIH Roadmap National Centers for Biomedical Computing (http://www.bisti.nih.gov/ncbc/). One of the goals of i2b2 is to provide clinical investigators broadly with the software tools necessary to collect and manage project-related clinical research data in the genomics age as a cohesive entity, a software suite to construct and manage the modern clinical research chart. The i2b2 "hive" is a set of software modules called "cells" that have a common messaging protocol that allow them to interact using web services and XML messages. Each cell can be developed by independent investigators to achieve specific analytic goals, and then be integrated into the hive to enhance the functionality available in the i2b2 Hive. We have applied this architecture through several ongoing clinical studies and found it to be of high value. The current version of this software has been released into the public domain and is available at the URL-http://www.i2b2.org.
Subject(s)
Biomedical Research/organization & administration , Genomics , Software , Animals , Computational Biology , Humans , Medical Records Systems, Computerized/organization & administration , Systems IntegrationABSTRACT
This paper describes the Shared Pathology Informatics Network (SPIN) submission model for uploading de-identified XML annotations of pathology case and specimen information to a distributed peer-to-peer network architecture. SPIN use cases, architecture, and technologies, as well as pathology information design is described. With the architecture currently in use by six member institutions, SPIN appears to be a viable, secure methodology to submit pathology information for query and specimen retrieval by investigators
