Biomedical subjects
Publications and source records attributed to W B Lober.
The DHAIR software system is a database-driven, web-based survey platform. It implements the delivery of survey instruments in packaged assessments, creation and editing of those assessments, researcher access to the results of the survey application, and a flexible authorization framework.
Access to multi-site clinical data regarding treatment and outcomes of HIV-infected patients in routine care is required to support clinical research to improve the treatment of HIV. As part of the NIAID-funded CFAR Network of Integrated Clinical Systems (CNICS), we have developed a relational XML Schema to extend the existing observational research repository and to integrate real-time clinical information from electronic medical records (EMRs) at six Centers for AIDS Research (CFAR) into the repository. The schema will aid the expansion of the research repository beyond the initial sites, and the development process may facilitate the use of multi-site repositories to study other chronic diseases.
We have implemented a customized Internet decision support system designed to engage men in the decision-making process for the management of localized prostate cancer. The system is delivered to patients in the patient education room of the UWMC Prostate Oncology Center. The system interactively guides the patient through a series of surveys, and delivers multi-media interaction modeling and decision support output, both of which are customized for the patient's preferences. The system is currently implemented on an open source platform.
A patient-centered health record is a personal health record that is patient-owned, patient-managed, and that represents the health information important to patients in the ways they prefer to represent it. The Patient-centered Health Record (PcHR) was developed to address these needs. Integration with traditional electronic health records adds significant value, and we used a national showcase to demonstrate the feasibility of exchanging health information through document level interoperability with commercial enterprise clinical systems.
Our objective for this project was to design a user interface (UI) for a patient-centered personal health record system that models how patients view their health information. We assessed user needs, examined how patients label and categorize health information, and evaluated two user interfaces that we designed for the Patient-Centered Health Record (PcHR) system. Our design process focused on discovering useful content and ensuring that the UI was intuitive, easy to use, and helpful for users.
Clinical information systems depend on close integration to workflow for success. We describe a method for user-driven design that guided our development of a computerized rounding and sign-out system. The resulting system supported clinical workflow sufficiently well that it spontaneously attracted new users, required no training, and is currently used by 95% of the house staff at two academic medical centers.
Concerns about detecting and responding to attacks with biowarfare agents have resulted in the development of deployable case reporting systems, e.g. RSVP. We implement a proof of concept web-based information system to be used securely from personal digital assistants over public wireless networks, by public health field workers for routine and emergent case reporting. The system collects data for a local health jurisdiction, provides content- and event-based notification, and forwards case reports to the Colorado State communicable disease reporting system (CEDRS). We believe this demonstrates a useful integration of portable and web-based technologies with public health practice.
This study describes an informatics effort to track subjects through a National Pharmaceutical Stockpile (NPS) distribution drill. The drill took place in Seattle on 1/24/2002. Washington and the State Department of Health are among the first in the nation to stage a NPS drill testing the distribution of medications to mock patients, thereby testing the treatment capacity of the plan given a post-anthrax exposure scenario. The goal of the Public Health Informatics Group at the University of Washington (www.phig.washington.edu) was to use informatics approaches to monitor subject numbers and elapsed time. This study compares accuracy of time measurements using a mobile phone Java application to traditional paper recording in a live drill of the NPS. Pearson correlation = 1.0 in 2 of 3 stations. Differences in last station measurements can be explained by delay in recording of the exit time. We discuss development of the application itself and lessons learned. (MeSH Bioterrorism, Informatics, Public Health)
Image Markup Language is an extensible markup language (XML) schema used to describe both image metadata and annotations. It describes both data pertaining to an entire image, and data that are tied to specific regions or features of the image. Developed for a specific domain in Medical Education, this pa-per describes extensions to take advantage of the Dublin Core metadata standard, and of an XML schema for vector graphics representation. We have developed a prototype system of open source tools implementing an authoring system, a client system, and an image annotation database which can be queried though the Web.