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The provision of technical information on health in developing countries is discussed, with particular reference to the Diarrhoeal Diseases Information Services Centre in Bangladesh. Progress towards meeting the pressing needs of the Third World in this field can undoubtedly be made by increasing the use of micrographic, computer and videodisc technologies and by reorganizing and promoting the facilities on offer.
When evaluated for promotion or tenure, faculty members are increasingly judged more on the quality than on the quantity of their scholarly publications. As a result, they want help from librarians in locating all citations to their published works for documentation in their curriculum vitae. Citation analysis using Science Citation Index and Social Science Citation Index provides a logical starting point in measuring quality, but the limitations of these sources leave a void in coverage of citations to an author's work. This article discusses alternative and additional methods of locating citations to published works.
It has been established that subject searches of medical full-text databases obtain higher recall than subject searches in a bibliographic database. In this study we attempted to determine if the same rule might apply when searching for a non-subject parameter such as study design. A simultaneous search of bibliographic and full-text records from the New England Journal of Medicine provided data on the number of items retrieved by each kind of search. Filtering strategies were created for 5 different study types: randomized controlled trials, other clinical trials and prospective studies, cohort studies, longitudinal and follow-up studies, and multicenter studies. The point of the study was to compare the numbers of items retrieved from the bibliographic database, MEDLINE, and those retrieved from the full-text version of NEJM, and to examine the unique access points available in each file. For all the study types the full-text file retrieved a larger number of records than MEDLINE, most of which were retrieved because of methodology terms found in the text but not in the title or abstract. In MEDLINE, descriptors and publication types, two value-added fields supplied by indexers, retrieved 11-89% more than title and abstract alone.
This paper describes research work on the design and creation of a medical folder management system capable of establishing co-operative dialogue with users who have access to the information contained therein. The research work has addressed the problem of integrating into the system knowledge about the medical domain and that about users, both necessary to activate co-operative dialogue. The CADMIO [2] prototype has been developed since the study was made. The last version of the CADMIO system stores information about users for the use in recognizing and interpreting their behavior, providing help, and in acquiring and returning further information. Depending on this information the system retrieves and shows the data of the medical folder in an intelligent way by highlighting links between data. It simplifies and increases the speed of the interaction by focusing on the data useful to the decisional activity of the physician.
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Cytokines are currently the focus of intense research efforts, and information related to cytokine biology is expanding at an extremely rapid rate. The primary literature has become insufficient as a source for timely information, and efficient searches of the older literature are complicated by the nature of cytokine nomenclature. A few computer-accessible cytokine-related data sources have recently been developed, but these are typically limited in scope and not integrated with other information resources. We have developed Cytokine Explorer, a World Wide Web (WWW)-based resource to provide access to and guidance in use of information for research and education in cytokine biology. The resource consists of: (1) a searchable thesaurus of cytokine nomenclature; (2) a cytokine reagent database containing information from academic institutions and commercial sources; (3) a set of links to cytokine-related WWW sites; and (4) a database of functional information retrieval maps for guided retrieval of cytokine information from combinations of heterogeneous sources.
The capture of patient data in a structured format receives increasing attention. Data can be extracted from free text using natural language processing techniques, but it can also be collected in a structured fashion at the time of data entry. The latter has the advantage that completeness and unambiguity can be promoted by offering predefined terms and options for description of findings. The paper discusses two models for supporting structured data entry. In the direct model, there is an immediate relationship between the terms and options for data entry and the structure of the underlying database. In the indirect model, terms and options for data entry are based on a controlled vocabulary and not directly related to the structure in which actual data is represented. Both models have been utilized by ORCA (Open Record for CAre). We discuss the pros and cons of these two models in relation to the type of patient data and the task involved. It is concluded that a strategic combination of both models has more strengths and less weaknesses than the use of each model only.
The Internet is a rapidly growing information resource for rapid publication and access to information. While it has attracted a certain mystique and is undoubtedly attractive as an information source, its rapid and chaotic growth mitigates against ease of use for novices. The authors-all associated with health-care providers in the Dade/Broward market-offer the novice user their best assessment for initial Web sites to explore for health care information, and general guidance on using Internet search engines to direct effective searches.
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AIMS: To compare the prices of cocaine powder and crack cocaine in the United States. DESIGN: Retail prices for crack and powder cocaine are compared for 14 US cities between 1986 and 1991 using regression analysis and t-tests. MEASUREMENTS: Prices are estimated from the United States Drug Enforcement Administration's System to Retrieve Information from Drug Evidence (STRIDE) database. FINDINGS: On average, crack is neither more nor less expensive per pure unit than powder cocaine. Prices are not equal in every city in every year, but crack is equally likely to be more or less expensive, and the differences are not large relative to variation in prices of both forms of cocaine between cities and over time. CONCLUSIONS: Crack has been widely believed to be cheaper than powder cocaine, and this "fact" has been used to help explain why US drug problems worsened in the 1980s. However, crack is not, in fact, cheaper per pure unit than powder cocaine. Other explanations must be sought for why crack spread so rapidly relative to powder cocaine.
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At the University Hospital Freiburg (1,927 beds; 53,000 inpatients/year), we developed and ran a Medical Information, Retrieval, and Archives System (MIRA) by integrating the Minimum Basic Data Set into the self developed patient administration system and all the other parts of our hospital information system. Especially for the physicians, MIRA offers access to basic medical data of all patients treated in all medical departments and separate buildings since 1986. MIRA is mainly used in cases of readmission and for scientific and managerial purposes. The privacy controlled access to the central patient data bases (records of 450,000 patients) of MIRA is possible via 610 online PCs and dialog terminals. Because of the many easy-to-use standard functions and special extensions for different clinical departments, MIRA became one of the best accepted edp systems for physicians, nurses and administrators.
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SUMMARY: We design and implement an integrated database system called 'multi-protein survey system' (MPSS), which provides a platform to retrieve information about many proteins at a time. This system integrates several important and widely used databases including SwissProt, TrEMBL, PDB and InterPro, plus useful references such as GO and KEGG to other databases. Users may submit a group of protein IDs, entry names, SwissProt/TrEMBL accession numbers or GenBank GIs through MPSS' web interface, and obtain protein annotation information from public databases and pre-computed molecular properties speedily. MPSS can also supply comprehensive information about query proteins, including 3D structures, domains, pathway, gene ontology and visual presentation of mapping to the GO tree and KEGG pathway, to provide an up-to-date view of available knowledge with regard to the structures and molecular functions of proteins under study. AVAILABILITY: MPSS is freely accessible at http://www.scbit.org/mpss/
The need and demand for improved adverse drug reaction reporting; literature access, control and dissemination; and student-literature exposure has been evident for many years. Drug information attempts to manage these perplexities by performing specific functions (i.e., by the communication of information, designing improved retrieval systems and offering individualized services). The drug information specialist is clinically-oriented and endeavors to surmount long-existing barriers to information transmission (e.g., the "invisible college" or colleague consultation). As a documentalist he is concerned with bibliographic control and systems improvement and design. Both functions require specialized education which is obtainable in schools of graduate pharmacy and in schools of library and information science. The properties of such programs are presented.
The efficient operation of a clinical picture archiving and communication system (PACS) requires a fully functional image archive. The archive should not only be able to store and retrieve images reliably but should also work in concert with software that optimizes the flow of image-related information throughout the PACS. The authors devised a software suite that serves to improve the flow and content of information and the integrity of the data. The software was developed by translating the functions performed by a conventional film library. Types of transactions possible with this system include scheduling, canceling, rescheduling, and prestaging examinations; changing demographic information; merging patient information; and generating reports. The authors believe such a software suite is essential for a clinically useful PACS.
The need for integrated financial and clinical information is becoming increasingly important to financial managers and clinicians alike. Typical billing systems collect only a small amount of clinical information. But by using billing systems more creatively--superimposing a clinical classification system on a billing system--hospital managers could retrieve clinical information from the billing system without undergoing chart review. The hospital's largest database, its billing information, could be used to more efficiently manager patient care.