AMIA ... Annual Symposium proceedings / AMIA Symposium. AMIA Symposium
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AMIA Annu Symp Proc · Jan 2006
Prospective evaluation of a closed-loop, computerized reminder system for pneumococcal vaccination in the emergency department.
The Emergency Department is a suitable but challenging environment to implement a sustainable pneumococcal vaccination program. To increase vaccination rates for patients > or equal to 65 years old, we prospectively evaluated a closed-loop informatics approach over a 6-week study period. Among the 572 candidate patients, 284 were up-to-date with vaccination, 187 patients refused vaccination, 65 physicians declined to order the vaccine, and 28 patients received the vaccine during the ED visit. The informatics approach increased vaccination rate from a baseline of 49.8% to 54.9% (p < 0.01).
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AMIA Annu Symp Proc · Jan 2006
Comparative StudyEvaluating the safety and efficiency of a CPOE system for continuous medication infusions in a pediatric ICU.
Critically ill children often require continuous intravenous infusions of life-supporting medications. The complexity of ordering such infusions makes this an error prone process, and such errors can result in serious adverse events. A CPOE system was developed and evaluated to assess its impact on the safety and efficiency of prescribing continuous medication infusions.
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AMIA Annu Symp Proc · Jan 2006
Combining image features, case descriptions and UMLS concepts to improve retrieval of medical images.
This paper evaluates a system, UBMedTIRS, for retrieval of medical images. The system uses a combination of image and text features as well as mapping of free text to UMLS concepts. ⋯ Our experimental results indicate that the proposed approach yields significant improvements in retrieval performance. Our system performs 156% above the GIFT system and 42% above the text retrieval system.
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The complex work processes and communication patterns exhibited in Emergency Medicine may be effectively managed through the use of information technology. These tools must be evaluated within the work environment to understand their effects on work flow, information flow, and patient safety. In this study the efficiency of the Emergency Department triage process was evaluated pre- and post- implementation of a computerized triage system. Time-and-motion analyses revealed no changes in triage documentation time; however, the duration of interruptions and the number of tasks decreased significantly.
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Transportation officers at mass casualty incidents are faced with the daunting task of tracking large amounts of patients as they leave the disaster scene. Patients often leave under their own power without notifying any authorities, presenting a problem for personnel attempting to account for every patient they have treated. This paper describes a system of tracking patients at a disaster scene or en route to hospitals using electronic triage tags registered with an external database.