A recent article in the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association1 caught my eye. The article, A systematic review of the psychological literature on interruption and its patient safety implications, looks at various tasks and variables associated with interruptions in healthcare. The article is a meta-analysis, and we all know what that means, but it is interesting nonetheless. The authors of the article say that it’s a complex issue, but I think at the heart of the matter interruptions are simply bad. Our brains just don’t multi-task the way we’d like them to, and interruptions cause a break in concentration and therefore a break in our focus. I know it always takes me a few seconds to regain my thoughts when someone interrupts me. This is especially true when I’m performing a complex task. And wouldn’t you consider providing care to patients a complex task? I would.
I was reading an article in the most recent issue of Patient Safety & Quality Healthcare and I ran accross the paragraph below. I had to chuckle to myself. Would this be the definition of irony?
Feel free to comment on what you think is wrong with this paragraph. Don’t look too hard because it should be immediately obvious to all healthcare providers. I’ll update the post tomorrow.
The practice of informatics: Application of information technology: MedEx: a medication information extraction system for clinical narratives
Hua Xu, Shane P Stenner, Son Doan, Kevin B Johnson, Lemuel R Waitman, Joshua C Denny
Abstract
Medication information is one of the most important types of clinical data in electronic medical records. It is critical for healthcare safety and quality, as well as for clinical research that uses electronic medical record data. However, medication data are often recorded in clinical notes as free-text. As such, they are not accessible to other computerized applications that rely on coded data. We describe a new natural language processing system (MedEx), which extracts medication information from clinical notes. MedEx was initially developed using discharge summaries. An evaluation using a data set of 50 discharge summaries showed it performed well on identifying not only drug names (F-measure 93.2%), but also signature information, such as strength, route, and frequency, with F-measures of 94.5%, 93.9%, and 96.0% respectively. We then applied MedEx unchanged to outpatient clinic visit notes. It performed similarly with F-measures over 90% on a set of 25 clinic visit notes.
Xu H, Stenner SP, Doan S, et al. MedEx: a medication information extraction system for clinical narratives. Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association. 2010;17(1):19-24.
Keeping up while on the information superhighway
Web 2.0 has certainly created an information revolution. I used to rely solely on journal articles to keep me up to date. Now I rely on an internet connection. Unfortunately, this creates a situation where information arrives faster than I can digest it, and if you’re not careful you can drown in the excess and end up not learning a thing.
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