Jerry Fahrni

Month: January 2010

  • Impact of Handheld Technology on Hospital Practice

    The Impact of Mobile Handheld Technology on Hospital Physicians’ Work Practices and Patient Care: A Systematic Review1

    The Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association
    Mirela Prgomet, Andrew Georgiou, Johanna I Westbrook

    Abstract

    The substantial growth in mobile handheld technologies has heralded the opportunity to provide physicians with access to information, resources, and people at the right time and place. But is this technology delivering the benefits to workflow and patient care promised by increased mobility? The authors conducted a systematic review to examine evidence regarding the impact of mobile handheld technology on hospital physicians’ work practices and patient care, focusing on quantification of the espoused virtues of mobile technologies. The authors identified thirteen studies that demonstrated the ability of personal digital assistants (PDAs) to positively impact on areas of rapid response, error prevention, and data management and accessibility. The use of PDAs demonstrates the greatest benefits in contexts where time is a critical factor and a rapid response crucial. However, the extent to which these devices improved outcomes and workflow efficiencies because of their mobility was largely absent from the literature. The paucity of evidence calls for much needed future research that asks explicit questions about the impact the mobility of devices has on work practices and outcomes.

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  • Sad, but all too common experiences with healthcare

    I read Warner Crocker’s musings at GottaBeMobile as well as his Tweets via the @LPH/tablet-pc-enthusiasts list on Twitter. Warner also has a second blog called Life On the Wicked Stage: Act 2, which I do not read with any regularity. I was, however, driven toward his personal blog secondary to a Twitter post. The post, titled Rush and My Mom: Two Different Care Experiences, talks a little about his experiences with his mothers medical care. She is apparently very ill with lung cancer. I sympathize with Warner as my mother-in-law, Mary Lou, succumbed to lung cancer in December of 2008. I also understand much of what he is talking about as my wife and I experienced similar problems during Mary Lou’s chemotherapy, pain management and surgeries.
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  • “What’d I miss?” – Week of December 27th

    As usual there were a lot of things that happened during the week, and not all of it was pharmacy or technology related. Here’s a quick look at some of the stuff I found interesting.
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  • MedEx: a medication information extraction system for clinical narratives

    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.