• Sebastian Wain: Take, for instance, the way Google's engine learns which words are synonyms. "We discovered a nifty thing very early on," Singhal says. "People change words in their queries. So someone would say, 'pictures of dogs,' and then they'd say, 'pictures of puppies.' So that told us that maybe 'dogs' and 'puppies' were interchangeable. We also learned that when you boil water, it's hot water. We were relearning semantics from humans, and that was a great advance."Fwd: Not your father's PageRank - http://kottke.org/10/02/not-your-fathers-pagerank (via http://ff.im/gHCI7)

    Updated: 2010-02-28 16:43:16

  • 21st Winter Olympic Public Health Surveillance: A Case of Technology-Enabled Knowledge Translation in Practice

    Updated: 2010-02-28 10:58:04
    “With the H1N1 Pandemic still fresh in our minds, the Winter Olympics have zeroed the spotlight on Vancouver. With 70,000 visitors per day, 5,000 athletes and staff, 1,350 Paralympic athletes, 10,000 media, 25,000 volunteers, and 8,000 security personnel, a single disease outbreak can become catastrophic. Historically, mass gatherings have been particularly sensitive to vector outbreaks. [...]

  • Infoway the way to sustainable future

    Updated: 2010-02-28 10:26:44
    “How can we efficiently reduce costs if millions of the tests we take annually are wasteful duplicates? How can we improve access to care when two-thirds of specialists seeing a new patient receive no up-front information? Canada urgently needs proven information technologies to manage and exchange health care information. Simply put, the right information must [...]

  • Using electronic health record alerts to provide public health situational awareness to clinicians

    Updated: 2010-02-28 07:47:44
    Alerting providers to public health situations requires timeliness and context-relevance, both lacking in current systems. Incorporating decision support tools into electronic health records may provide a way to deploy public health alerts to clinicians at the point of care. A timely process for responding to Health Alert Network messages sent by the New York City [...]

  • The impact of electronic medical records data sources on an adverse drug event quality measure

    Updated: 2010-02-28 07:35:22
    Objective To examine the impact of billing and clinical data extracted from an electronic medical record system on the calculation of an adverse drug event (ADE) quality measure approved for use in The Joint Commission’s ORYX program, a mandatory national hospital quality reporting system. Design The Child Health Corporation of America’s “Use of Rescue Agents—ADE Trigger” [...]

  • Few Federal Employees Using PHRs

    Updated: 2010-02-27 10:15:49
    “Despite the wide availability of personal health records (PHRs) from federal health plans, few federal employees actually use them, the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) said in an annual report published Feb. 5. In 2009, 86 percent of health plans made PHRs available for their federal members, compared with 75 percent in 2008 and 51 percent [...]

  • Health records privacy risk is clear

    Updated: 2010-02-27 07:43:01
    “A security expert has supported moves by London GPs to warn the public of the dangers of having an electronic health record. Ross Anderson, a professor of security engineering at Cambridge University, has written a blog warning that the summary care record (SCR) has a clear privacy risk and has questionable usefulness.” Article Public Service, 26 February 2010

  • Hospital Hopes iPhone App Will Improve Patient Satisfaction, Efficiency

    Updated: 2010-02-26 21:06:59
    “Proponents of The Hospital of Central Connecticut’s newly available iPhone application that posts wait times at its facilities’ emergency rooms say the information will improve both patient satisfaction and ED efficiency. Every five minutes, the free iPhone app posts emergency room wait times at HCC’s New Britain General and Bradley Memorial campuses. The app also provides [...]

  • HCD Announces Meaningful Use Dashboard for Health Systems

    Updated: 2010-02-26 21:01:08
    “The Meaningful Use Dashboard, based on the Interim Final Rule issued on December 31,2009, is able to present all of the indicators identified as part of the Interim Final Rule. The Dashboard will be updated as the Final Rule is put in place. Regardless of source system and the number of facilities or departments, the [...]

  • Telemedicine can enhance lives of chronically ill patients

    Updated: 2010-02-26 20:57:14
    “CARME (Catalan Remote Management Evaluation) study’s preliminar results, conducted by Philips Healthcare and the Catalonian Health Service (ICS) show significant benefits in the management of certain chronic diseases, thanks to telemedicine, an innovative technique that allows the continuous monitoring and a higher patient’s implication in the disease treatment. These results are presented during the II, [...]

  • Small Book Review: Analytics at Work

    Updated: 2010-02-26 20:43:21
    Analytics at Work is the new book of Thomas Davenport, Jeanne Harris and Robert Morison. Davenport and Harris already published Competing on Analytics in 2007. Both books are quite different in their targeted audience. I will not discuss the first book here, but I had an interview with Jeanne Harris that will soon appear on [...]

  • Biomedical informatics and translational medicine

    Updated: 2010-02-26 19:58:11
    Biomedical informatics involves a core set of methodologies that can provide a foundation for crossing the “translational barriers” associated with translational medicine. To this end, the fundamental aspects of biomedical informatics (e.g., bioinformatics, imaging informatics, clinical informatics, and public health informatics) may be essential in helping improve the ability to bring basic research findings to [...]

  • Doctors use EHR for older, richer patients – Study shows.

    Updated: 2010-02-26 18:38:10
    “Your doctor tends to use electronic health records if you’re older or richer: a new riff on meaningful use: “There’s a new survey on EHRs out that most industry news outlets have headlined, ‘More doctors have gone digital.’ This, directly from the survey’s title, Doctors Gone Digital, conducted by GfK Roper Public Affairs & Media for [...]

  • CHIME airs “critical concerns” about EHR incentive program

    Updated: 2010-02-26 18:27:30
    “The College of Healthcare Information Management Executives filed its comments regarding the EHR Incentive Program with the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services on Friday. The comments address what the Ann Arbor, Mich.-based organization calls “critical concerns” regarding the proposed regulations that were unveiled on December 30, 2009. The organization, which has 1,400 members representing chief [...]

  • AHRQ: Health IT could be disruptive while reducing rehospitalization rates, costs

    Updated: 2010-02-26 18:05:50
    “The use of health IT to reduce rehospitalizations will be welcome but also disruptive, said Stephen Jencks, independent consultant in healthcare safety during a Feb. 24 Webinar on the potential use of health IT to mitigate rehospitalizations, sponsored by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ). “We know that IT and the communities and communication [...]

  • Telepathology for patient care: what am I getting myself into?

    Updated: 2010-02-26 17:52:36
    The vast advancements in telecommunications and converting medical information to a digital format have increased the number of applications within telemedicine. Telepathology, in simplest terms, is the practice of formally rendering a pathologic diagnosis based upon examination of an image rather than of a glass slide through traditional microscopy. The use of telepathology for clinical [...]

  • Integrative Primary Care and the Internet: Opportunities and Challenges

    Updated: 2010-02-26 17:42:16
    The Internet: gateway to reliable clinical and research information or floodgate to unsubstantiated information of insufficient depth and variable quality? Can it help the physician locate high-quality information that will enhance patient care? Can it help patients become more knowledgeable, involved, and competent in participating in their health care management? Can it be used efficiently [...]

  • A human factors and survey methodology-based design of a web-based adverse event reporting system for families

    Updated: 2010-02-26 17:21:35
    Purpose Adverse event reporting systems allow healthcare institutions to detect and prevent recurrence of avoidable patient harm. It is known that standard reporting systems, which are initiated by clinicians, detect only a minority of chart-documented adverse events. The objective of the study was to develop a web-based system, the Family Reporting System (FRS), to elicit adverse [...]

  • Clinical data mining and research in the allergy office

    Updated: 2010-02-26 16:38:19
    Purpose of review: More data are anticipated from the expected increase in use of electronic health records (EHRs). Upcoming initiatives require reporting of quality measures, meaningful use of clinical decision support, alert systems, and pharmacovigilance – knowledge resulting through use of EHRs. Data mining is a new tool that will help us manage information and derive [...]

  • Achieving Efficiency Improvements in the Health Sector through the Implementation of Information and Communication Technologies

    Updated: 2010-02-26 09:18:33
    “This report presents an analysis of OECD countries’ efforts to implement information and communication technologies (ICTs) in health care systems. It provides advice on the range of policy options, conditions and practices that policy makers can adapt to their own national circumstances to accelerate adoption and effective use of these technologies. The analysis draws upon [...]

  • Tasmania to Roll Out EHR System

    Updated: 2010-02-26 09:12:02
    “The Tasmanian Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) is to deploy a shared electronic health record (EHR) system. In DHHS documents the agency said it was looking for a data aggregation, and clinical and business intelligence solution as a foundation for the three Area Health Services, Statewide and Mental Health Services, Tasmanian Ambulance Service and [...]

  • LDA Clustering for Gene Pathway Inference

    Updated: 2010-02-25 21:46:59
    Natural Language Processing and Text Analytics

  • Web Mining: Short/Long Term User Profile

    Updated: 2010-02-21 18:04:25
    It’s now nearly one year that I manage a project about targeted advertising for a Telco company in Switzerland. The particularity of our approach is the fusion of offline (CRM) and online (web) customer profiles. We build these extended customer profiles (ECP) on a shifting time window. These ECP are then mined to predict some [...]

  • Bing Maps Updates Hyperlocal Application

    Updated: 2010-02-18 05:52:28
    Today we pushed out a modest update to our hyperlocal application Local Lens. Users won't see a huge difference, but behind the scenes we have improved our text mining systems which recognize and map entity names (e.g. restaurants, museums, coffee...

  • Apps are great, but Ecosystems are better

    Updated: 2010-02-15 05:01:21
    By now, everyone is pretty much on the same page with apps on mobile devices. The popularity of these programs, which range from simple widgets to full applications, is not surprising given a) the model has been in existence for...

  • Bing Maps Continues To Innovate

    Updated: 2010-02-12 04:56:58
    Take a moment to check out this video which shows some of the content that Blaise presented at TED today. There are two key features: integration and matching of photographs to our human scale imagery, and the integration of the...

  • Making disastrous downtime a thing of the past: a guide to business continuity

    Updated: 2010-02-11 10:04:00
    Tough economic challenges mean that businesses cannot afford any downtime, particularly to their business critical applications and data.

  • Data Mining: Get Affordable Outsource Data Mining Services http://www.prlog.org/10525096-affordable-data-mining-services-at-60-cutting-rates.html Online Web Research is a leading web research services provider company. Online Web Research experience and skills enables us to pinpoint exactly the services needed to attain the most cost-effective solution possible.

    Updated: 2010-02-09 11:26:39

  • Visualizing Vultures

    Updated: 2010-02-08 16:34:34
    Driving back from the slopes on Saturday we got caught in a jam due to an accident on the 520 bridge over Lake Washington. Looking at the traffic we can see that while the crash was on the westbound lane...

  • Current Reading in Data Mining

    Updated: 2010-02-07 15:31:49
    I’m currently reading two interesting books about analytics and data mining. I will review these two books in the near future. Meanwhile, here is a few information about these books: Analytics at Work (Davenport/Harris): I recently had the chance to receive an advance reader’s copy of this book (publication date: February 12th). Comparing to Competing on [...]

  • Evaluating with Unbalanced Training Data

    Updated: 2010-02-04 20:22:36
    Natural Language Processing and Text Analytics

  • Tree Map Visualization of Budget

    Updated: 2010-02-03 15:12:44
    The New York Times has an interesting visualization of the budget proposal. While this gets off to a good start, it doesn’t really deliver due to the lack of true zooming. When you zoom into a portion of the image,...

  • Your friends could be the reason why you were denied credit!

    Updated: 2010-02-03 04:12:53
    We all know that our credit reports are used to determine our future credit risk. Last year it emerged that American Express was using the shops where we make purchases to deny credit to customers. Now a new company is data-mining our friends on social networking sites to determine credit risk. Yes, really! You Facebook-friended that loser [...]

  • Search and Social Media 2010

    Updated: 2010-02-03 01:17:38
    Tomorrow I will be attending Search and Social Media (at WSDM) - and am very much looking forward to it. While thinking about the workshop I realised that the title can lead to endless debates around the definition of 'search'...

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