The Lego Movie
[Noun] Informatics
The Horse's Mouth
Anything You Can Do I Can Do Better
He's Got Issues
100
This term is often used erroneously to refer to the broad field of biomedical informatics.
What is biomedical informatics? Originally referring to the informatics of biotechnology (DNA and protein sequencing), it is typically used for informatics related to molecular biology and computational biology, but it does not cover the domain of clinical informatics.
100
He was the designer of the problem-oriented medical record.
Who is Larry Weed? His original paper published in two parts in the New England Journal of Medicine in 1968 is a classic in informatics and contains many forward thinking ideas that are still futuristic today.
100
This NLM resource has clinical study results, including those that have not yet appeared in the published in literature.
What is ClinicalTrials.gov? The Food and Drug Administration Amendments Act of 2007 (FDAAA; pronounced "fa-DAA") and the International Council of Medical Journal Editors both require researchers to register their trials prior to subject enrollment.
100
This popular open source system is being used around the world for electronic capture of research data.
What is REDCap? REDCap currently has 1,172 consortium partners, 129,000 projects, and 173,000 users in 85 countries.
100
This messaging standard has been widely adopted for the exchange of laboratory and other EHR data.
What is HL7? Version 2 has been popular but has many limitations. Version 3 adoption has proved cumbersome. A new light-weight version called FHIR (pronounced "fire") has been developed to address these issues.
200
This is considered the most important desideratum of controlled biomedical terminologies.
What is concept orientation? Establishing the idea that the unit of discourse is the concept, not the term or name for the concept, it includes the requirements for nonvagueness, nonredundancy and nonredundnacy, and it is the basis for other desiderata, such as concept permanence.
200
This is an electronic medical record (EMR) that contains comprehensive patient information, including health maintenance data.
What is an electronic health record (EHR)? EHRs should seek to include data from all the EMRs used by all of the patient's clinicians.
200
This is the number of articles in PubMed Central.
What is 3.2 million? The old answer (two days ago) "What is 3 million?", will also be accepted.
200
This stochastic modeling method describes a sequence of possible events in which the probability of each event depends only on the state attained in the previous event.
What is Markov modeling? In addition to the Markov chains we have seen, there are also forms called hidden Markov models and Markov random fields.
200
These high-quality standard terminologies are being required for exchange of laboratory and medication data, respectively.
What are LOINC and RXNorm? Both of these can be obtained from the UMLS.
300
Not a reference to twisted orthodonture, this is the most significant impediment to sharing Medical Logic Modules.
What is the curly braces problem? Medical Logic Modules, or MLMs, provide a standard way to express decision support logic, but the mapping of the logical concepts to EHR data is expressed as un-automatable narrative text enclosed in { }.
300
While many personal health records (PHRs) are stand-alone, these are attached to the EHR of a health system.
What are tethered PHRs? Personal health records (PHRs) contain the same types of information as EHRs—diagnoses, medications, immunizations, family medical histories, and provider contact information but are designed to be managed by patients.
300
It is the meaning of the "*" in the partial Medline Citation below: TI - Issues in the registration of clinical trials. MH - *Clinical Trials as Topic/ethics/standards MH - Databases, Factual MH - Information Dissemination
What is a Major Topic? The MeSH headings indication the general topics of the article; asterisks indicate the most important topics; the terms following the "/", called subheadings, refine the MeSH headings and can also be flagged with asterisks.
300
This is defined as the degree to which individuals have the capacity to obtain, process and understand basic information and services needed to make appropriate decisions regarding their health.
What is health literacy? An eighth grade reading level is usually assumed but health terminology is often inadequate for patient comprehension.
300
This law includes a provision to protect personal health information.
What is the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA)? Data can be considered de-identified by removal of 18 "safe harbor" items (one of which is "anything else") or by a method certified by a privacy expert.
400
This simulation method relies on randomization.
What is stochastic modeling? This class of computational algorithms relies on random assignment of modeling variables. Monte Carlo simulation, named because of its similarity to casino gambling, is a well-known example of stochastic modeling.
400
This response by physicians to clinical alerts can be as high as 96%.
What is override? Overrides are often due not to false positive alerts but to alert fatigue.
400
Semantic Medline uses this technique to summarize Medline citations.
What is natural language processing? The Semantic MEDLINE Database contains approximately 70 million semantic predications from more than 23.5 million PubMed citations.
400
This standard supports exchange of medical images and their metadata.
What is the Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine (DICOM) standard? DICOM enables the integration of scanners, servers, workstations, printers, and network hardware from multiple manufacturers into a picture archiving and communication system (PACS).
400
Although its name was politically correct when it was established in 1990, the name of this Bethesda, Maryland organization, the professional home for biomedical informatics, is a bit anachronistic.
What is the American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA)? AMIA's Annual Symposium is the largest annual biomedical informatics conference in the world, usually held in November, usually in Washington, DC.
500
This measure looks at the distribution of genetic findings in a population and judges if this pattern is the result of known genetic inheritance, or not.
What is the Hardy-Weinberg statistic? The calculation relies on seven underlying assumptions, including that organisms are diploid, only sexual reproduction occurs, generations are non overlapping, mating is random, population size is infinitely large, allele frequencies are equal in the sexes, and there is no migration, mutation or selection.
500
These are the two main architectures for health information exchanges.
What are federated and central exchanges? Centralized systems are easier to use, while federated systems are easier to establish and maintain.
500
This linked resource from the NCBI has information on disorders with links to the literature, genetic tests and clinical trials.
What is MEDGEN? NCBI also hosts GENE, which contains biological information about a gene expression, structure and function.
500
This is the data visualization mantra.
What is "Overview, filter & zoom, details-on-demand"? This mantra first appeared in a 1996 Visual Languages paper by Ben Shneiderman, entitled, “The eyes have it: A task by data type taxonomy for information visualization”.
500
Unlike Stage 1 rules for the meaningful use of EHRs (focused on data capture and sharing) and Stage 2 rules (focused on advanced clinical processes), Stage 3 rules are focused on this.
What is "improved outcomes"? Specific requirements are still under discussion.
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