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Biomedical subjects

E H Shortliffe

Publications and source records attributed to E H Shortliffe.

At least 37 records · Page 2Linked to original sources
PubMed1998

The evolution of health-care records in the era of the Internet.

Health-care records are evolving as the rationale for their automation becomes ever more persuasive. Promoting that evolution are local and wide-area networking as they demonstrate that computer-based medical and health records will be more than mere electronic versions of the traditional paper record. System integration has emerged as a key element in the reinvention of environments for patient data management and health promotion. The ability to achieve the future vision of integrated health records depends in part on current research initiatives related to the role of the global information infrastructure in supporting health and health care.

Computer Literacy↗
PubMed1998

Scalable methodologies for distributed development of logic-based convergent medical terminology.

As the size and complexity of medical terminologies increase, terminology modelers are increasingly hampered by lack of tools and methods to manage the development process. This paper presents our use and ongoing evaluation of a description-logic classifier to support cognitive scalability of the underlying terminology and our enhancements to that classifier to support concurrent development utilizing semantics-based concurrency control methods. Our enhancements, collectively referred to as the Gálapagos, consist of several applications that take locally-developed terminology enhancements from multiple sites, identify conflicting design decisions, support the modelers' reconciliation of the conflicting designs, and efficiently disseminate updates tailored for locally enhanced terminologies. We have tested our ideas through concurrent evolutionary enhancement of SNOMED International at three Kaiser Permanente regions and the Mayo Clinic. We have found that the underlying environment has met our design objectives, and supports semantic-based concurrency control, and identification and resolution of conflicting design decisions.

Artificial Intelligence↗
PubMed1998

The next generation Internet and health care: a civics lesson for the informatics community.

The Internet provides one of the most compelling examples of the way in which government research investments can, in time, lead to innovations of broad social and economic impact. This paper reviews the history of the Internet's evolution, emphasizing in particular its relationship to medical informatics and to the nation's health-care system. Current national research programs are summarized and the need for more involvement by the informatics community and by federal health-care agencies is emphasized.

Computing Methodologies↗
PubMed1996

Research takes on a second life. Interview by John McCornack.

The health care industry is embracing the artificial intelligence concepts that Edward H. Shortliffe, M.D., developed in the 1970s. His current work on Web-based information dissemination may yield applications for the next century.

Artificial Intelligence↗
PubMed1996

Collaborative medical informatics research using the Internet and the World Wide Web.

The InterMed Collaboratory is an interdisciplinary project involving six participating medical institutions. There are two broad mandates for the effort. The first is to further the development, sharing, and demonstration of numerous software and system components, data sets, procedures and tools that will facilitate the collaborations and support the application goals of these projects. The second is to provide a distributed suite of clinical applications, guidelines, and knowledge-bases for clinical, educational, and administrative purposes. To define the interactions among the components, datasets, procedures, and tools that we are producing and sharing, we have identified a model composed of seven tiers, each of which supports the levels above it. In this paper we briefly describe those tiers and the nature of the collaborative process with which we have experimented.

Computer Communication Networks↗
PubMed1996

Gálapagos: computer-based support for evolution of a convergent medical terminology.

Current controlled medical terminologies fall short of the needs of informatics application developers. To overcome the limitations of current medical terminologies, many groups are independently enhancing existing terminologies to meet their local needs. With proper computer-based support, local enhancements can be used as evolutionary stepping stones toward a convergent medical terminology. Gálapagos is a collection of applications that can take local enhancements from multiple sites, identify conflicting design decisions, allow developers to reconcile the conflicting designs, and efficiently disseminate updates tailored specifically for compatibility with locally enhanced terminologies. This paper describes an initial proof-of-concept of the Gálapagos programs using data generated during concurrent SNOMED enhancement by Kaiser Permanente and the Mayo Clinic.

Medical Informatics Computing↗
PubMed1995

Computer-based screening of patients with HIV/AIDS for clinical-trial eligibility.

OBJECTIVE: To assess the potential effect of a computer-based system on accrual to clinical trials, we have developed methodology to identify retrospectively and prospectively patients who are eligible or potentially eligible for protocols. DESIGN: Retrospective chart abstraction with computer screening of data for potential protocol eligibility. SETTING: A county-operated clinic serving human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) positive patients with or without acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS). PATIENTS: A randomly selected group of 60 patients who were HIV-infected, 30 of whom had an AIDS-defining diagnosis. DESIGN: Using a computer-based eligibility screening system, for each clinic visit and hospitalization, patients were categorized as eligible, potentially eligible, or ineligible for each of the 17 protocols active during the 7-month study period. Reasons for ineligibility were categorized. RESULTS: None of the patients was enrolled on a clinical trial during the 7-month period. Thirteen patients were identified as eligible for protocol; three patients were eligible for two different protocols; and one patient was eligible for the same protocol during two different time intervals. Fifty-four patients were identified as potentially eligible for a total of 165 accrual opportunities, but important information, such as the result of a required laboratory test, was missing, so that eligibility could not be determined unequivocally. Ineligibility for protocol was determined in 414 (35%) potential opportunities based only on conditions that were amenable to modification, such as the use of concurrent medications; 194 (17%) failed only laboratory tests or subjective determinations not routinely performed; and 346 (29%) failed only routine laboratory tests. CONCLUSIONS: There are substantial numbers of eligible and potentially eligible patients who are not enrolled or evaluated for enrollment in prospective clinical trials. Computer-based eligibility screening when coupled with a computer-based medical record offers the potential to identify patients eligible or potentially eligible for clinical trial, to assist in the selection of protocol eligibility criteria, and to make accrual estimates.

Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome↗
PubMed1995

Contextual models of clinical publications for enhancing retrieval from full-text databases.

Conventional methods for retrieving information from the medical literature are imprecise and inefficient. Information retrieval systems employ unmanageable indexing vocabularies or use full-text representations that overwhelm the user with irrelevant information. This paper describes a document representation designed to improve the precision of searching in textual databases without significantly compromising recall. The representation augments simple text word representations with contextual models that reflect recurring semantic themes in clinical publications. Using this representation, a searcher may indicate both the terms of interest and the contexts in which they should occur. The contexts limit the potential interpretations of text words, and thus form the basis for more precise searching. In this paper, we discuss the shortcomings of traditional retrieval systems and describe our context-based representation. Improved retrieval performance with contextual models is illustrated by example, and a more extensive study is proposed. We present an evaluation of the contextual models as an indexing scheme, using a variation of the traditional inter-indexer consistency experiments, and we demonstrate that contextual indexing is reproducible by minimally trained physicians and medical students.

Abstracting and Indexing↗
PubMed1995

A model of clinical query management that supports integration of biomedical information over the World Wide Web.

A model of clinical query management is described that supports the integration of various types of biomedical information and the delivery of that information through a common interface. The model extends the architecture of the World Wide Web to include a Common Gateway Interface (CGI) mediator, which takes in user queries, performs syntactic and semantic processing to transform the input to a canonical form, selects the appropriate information sources to answer the query, translates the canonical query statement into a query of each information resource, queries the chosen information sources in parallel, and controls the analysis and display of results. We describe WebMedline, a CGI mediator that implements portions of this model, and discuss the benefits and limitations of this approach.

Computer Communication Networks↗
PubMed1994

Health care professional workstations: where are we now? ... where should we be tomorrow?

This article looks back over four years during which major changes have occurred in healthcare informatics, both technically and from a policy perspective. A remarkable portion of what medical-informatics professionals were proposing in 1989 has subsequently come to pass. Thus, one lesson from reflections on the recent past is that now is the time for us to devise realistic expectations of what we will see happen in the next four years. Possible scenarios for the future are outlined, as are suggestions for how the informatics community might best prepare for what lies ahead.

Computer Communication Networks↗
PubMed1994

Traditional medical records as a source of clinical data in the outpatient setting.

We conducted an observational study at a university hospital clinic to determine the success with which physicians find patient information using traditional hospital records as the source of data. We recorded 168 consecutive patient cases presented to attending physicians by internal medicine residents, and analyzed the transcripts to identify questions indicating that the physicians could not find patient information in the medical record. In 81 percent of the cases, physicians could not find all the patient information that they desired during a patient's visit. We performed thematic analysis to generate a set of 15 prototypical questions asked by physicians regarding patient information. The multiauthored medical record system we studied did not provide effective access to patient information for physicians making clinical decisions in an outpatient setting. Improved methods for addressing prototypical questions arising in routine practice are needed.

Decision Making↗
PubMed1993

The adolescence of AI in medicine: will the field come of age in the '90s?

Artificial intelligence in medicine (AIM) has reached a period of adolescence in which interactions with the outside world are not only natural but mandatory. Although the basic research topics in AIM may be those of artificial intelligence, the applied issues touch more generally on the broad field of medical informatics. To the extent that AIM research is driven by performance goals for biomedicine, AIM is simply one component within a wide range of research and development activities. Furthermore, an adequate appraisal of AIM research requires an understanding of the research motivations, the complexity of the problems, and a suitable definition of the criteria for judging the field's success. Effective fielding of AIM systems will be dependent on the development of integrated environments for communication and computing that allow merging of knowledge-based tools with other patient data-management and information-retrieval applications. The creation of this kind of infrastructure will require vision and resources from leaders who realize that the practice of medicine is inherently an information-management task and that biomedicine must make the same kind of coordinated commitment to computing technologies as have other segments of our society in which the importance of information management is well understood.

Artificial Intelligence↗
PubMed1993

Graphical access to medical expert systems: V. Integration with continuous-speech recognition.

This paper describes three prototypes of computer-based clinical record-keeping tools that use a combination of window-based graphics and continuous speech in their user interfaces. Although many of today's commercial speech-recognition products achieve high rates of accuracy for large grammars (vocabularies of words or collections of sentences and phrases), they can only "listen for" (and therefore recognize) a limited number of words or phrases at a time. When a speech application requires a grammar whose size exceeds a speech-recognition product's limits, the application designer must partition the large grammar into several smaller ones and develop control mechanisms that permit users to select the grammar that contains the words or phrases they wish to utter. Furthermore, the user interfaces they design must provide feedback mechanisms that show users the scope of the selected grammars. The three prototypes described were designed to explore the use of window-based graphics as control and feedback mechanisms for continuous-speech recognition in medical applications. Our experiments indicate that window-based graphics can be effectively used to provide control and feedback for certain classes of speech applications, but they suggest that the techniques we describe will not suffice for applications whose grammars are very complex.

Decision Making, Computer-Assisted↗
PubMed1992

T-HELPER: automated support for community-based clinical research.

There are increasing expectations that community-based physicians who care for people with HIV infection will offer their patients opportunities to enroll in clinical trials. The information-management requirements of clinical investigation, however, make it unrealistic for most providers who do not practice in academic centers to participate in clinical research. Our T-HELPER computer system offers community-based physicians the possibility of enrolling patients in clinical trials as a component of primary care. T-HELPER facilitates data management for patients with HIV disease, and can offer patient-specific and situation-specific advice concerning new protocols for which patients may be eligible and the treatment required by those protocols in which patients currently are enrolled. We are installing T-HELPER at three county-operated AIDS clinics in the San Francisco Bay Area, and plan a comprehensive evaluation of the system and its influence on clinical research.

Clinical Trials as Topic↗