Jim Jirjis | PubMed Health

PubMed2005

A framework for clinical communication supporting healthcare delivery.

Interpersonal communications related to healthcare delivery, called clinical communications, take up a considerable amount of time. Nonetheless, there exist few tools in electronic health record systems that support clinical communications. We describe a framework for clinical communications and describe our experiences implementing tools to manage and document them within an electronic health record system. Categories of clinical communications include communications between patients and healthcare providers, among healthcare providers on a single clinical team, between healthcare providers in different clinical teams and different institutions, and between healthcare providers and individuals who can provide additional educational or evidence based materials to support care delivery.

Communication↗

PubMed2003

Adequacy of representation of the National Drug File Reference Terminology Physiologic Effects reference hierarchy for commonly prescribed medications.

The National Drug File Reference Terminology contains a novel reference hierarchy to describe physiologic effects (PE) of drugs. The PE reference hierarchy contains 1697 concepts arranged into two broad categories; organ specific and generalized systemic effects. This investigation evaluated the appropriateness of the PE concepts for classifying a random selection of commonly prescribed medications. Ten physician reviewers classified the physiologic effects of ten drugs and rated the accuracy of the selected term. Inter reviewer agreement, overall confidence, and concept frequencies were assessed and were correlated with the complexity of the drug's known physiologic effects. In general, agreement between reviewers was fair to moderate (kappa 0.08-0.49). The physiologic effects modeled became more disperse with drugs having and inducing multiple physiologic processes. Complete modeling of all physiologic effects was limited by reviewers focusing on different physiologic processes. The reviewers were generally comfortable with the accuracy of the concepts selected. Overall, the PE reference hierarchy was useful for physician reviewers classifying the physiologic effects of drugs. Ongoing evolution of the PE reference hierarchy as it evolves should take into account the experiences of our reviewers.

Drug Therapy↗

PubMed2003

StarTracker: an integrated, web-based clinical search engine.

This poster details the design and use of the StarTracker clinical search engine. This program is fully integrated within our electronic medical record system and allows users to enter simple rules that direct formatted searches of multiple legacy databases.

Databases as Topic↗