AMIA and JAMIA in the News

A few weeks ago, I wrote an article titled Health IT Savings Are Not Hype in response to an article that appeared in the Wall Street Journal questioning the value of EHRs to the U.S. healthcare system. It appears I wasn’t the only one with something to say. Since the Wall Street Journal article was published in mid-September, a wave of new studies has emerged that clearly show how EHRs are helping improve patient care and increase physician efficiency.

A recent study[1] that used electronic health records to analyze data on nearly one million patients demonstrates how health IT can help advance clinical research, InformationWeek[2] reports. Study Details Researchers at MetroHealth Medical Center and Explorys conducted the study -- which was published online in the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association -- to determine the effects of height and weight on blood clots in the lung or leg. For the study, researchers used an Expl...

Robert S. Ledley (1926-2012)

AMIA and the field of informatics lost a pioneering contributor to our discipline when Bob Ledley passed away on July 24th at the age of 86. A founding fellow of ACMI, an early keynote speaker at the Annual Symposium, and a Collen Award recipient in 1998, Bob and his colleague Lee B. Lusted wrote a seminal 1959 paper in Science that many people cite as the publication that launched the field (Reasoning Foundations of Medical Diagnosis).

 Physicians using electronic health records that give alerts about appropriate clinical trials experience alert fatigue but rates of response remain relatively high, according to a new study. Still, overall results are mixed.

Researchers for 36 weeks documented the response patterns of 178 physicians receiving alerts for an ongoing clinical trial, collecting data on response rates to the alert and patient referral rates. Response rates declined over time, but even after 36 weeks remained in the 30 to 40 percent range, concludes the study.