Statistics in medical research.
Explore the source record for details and available documents.
Biomedical subjects
Publications and source records attributed to H M Schoolman.
Explore the source record for details and available documents.
Explore the source record for details and available documents.
Explore the source record for details and available documents.
In 1986, the National Library of Medicine (NLM) assembled a large multidisciplinary, multisite team to work on the Unified Medical Language System (UMLS), a collaborative research project aimed at reducing fundamental barriers to the application of computers to medicine. Beyond its tangible products, the UMLS Knowledge Sources, and its influence on the field of informatics, the UMLS project is an interesting case study in collaborative research and development. It illustrates the strengths and challenges of substantive collaboration among widely distributed research groups. Over the past decade, advances in computing and communications have minimized the technical difficulties associated with UMLS collaboration and also facilitated the development, dissemination, and use of the UMLS Knowledge Sources. The spread of the World Wide Web has increased the visibility of the information access problems caused by multiple vocabularies and many information sources which are the focus of UMLS work. The time is propitious for building on UMLS accomplishments and making more progress on the informatics research issues first highlighted by the UMLS project more than 10 years ago.
Since the 1970s, it has been clear that the health community needs to develop a health care system that matches a person's needs with the expertise and technology to address those needs. The logical solution is a multi-tiered system. In such a system, physicians would provide second- and third-tier services and other health professionals would provide first- and second-tier services. Medical informatics should take on the challenge of supporting the decision to triage patients from one tier of service to another. Triage decisions are different from other decisions in health sciences because they take place early in the life of a problem, when little information is available, and can be made safely if adjusted to tolerate erring on the side of referral.
Builders of expert systems have generally accepted the principle that computer software should not be subject to government regulation if health care practitioners can be expected to interpret and apply the systems intelligently. The purpose of this paper is to identify the information that builders must make available to permit health care practitioners to exercise their clinical judgment in interpreting and applying the output of computing systems.