Proceedings / the ... Annual Symposium on Computer Application [sic] in Medical Care. Symposium on Computer Applications in Medical Care
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Proc Annu Symp Comput Appl Med Care · Jan 1993
Improving the efficiency of patient recruitment with an automated telephone screening system in a client-server environment.
An automated telephone screening system was implemented at the Baltimore VA Hospital on a Local Area Network (LAN) to evaluate older adults for the GRECC research program. Using the system for decision support, a registered nurse (RN) placed 117 phone calls to older adults in the Baltimore community over a 3 month period. The modular design of the system allowed tracking of inclusion and exclusion criteria which was shared by clinicians and researchers. ⋯ Effectiveness is defined as avoiding under--or over--screening. Using the telephone system, it is estimated the research team saved over $6,000.00 in unnecessary medical evaluation in a 3 months period. As the system develops, the process by which older adults are assessed for research programs in the Geriatrics Service at the Baltimore VAMC will provide additional cost efficiencies.
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Proc Annu Symp Comput Appl Med Care · Jan 1993
Words or concepts: the features of indexing units and their optimal use in information retrieval.
Words or Concepts, which are a better choice for indexing the contents of documents? The answer depends on what method is used for retrieval. This paper studies the effects of using canonical concepts versus document words in different retrieval systems with a testing collection of MEDLINE documents. ⋯ For a system which depends on the UMLS synonym set for a mapping from queries or documents to canonical concepts, the retrieval results were slightly better than the case of not using the synonyms, but still worse than the systems using words. For the systems which automatically "learn" empirical connections between words and concepts from examples in the testing collection, the vocabulary problem was effectively solved, and the results of using concepts were competitive or better, compared to those using words.