This book trains the next generation of scientists representing different disciplines to leverage the data generated during routine patient care. It formulates a more complete lexicon of evidence-based recommendations and support shared, ethical decision making by doctors with their patients. Diagnostic and therapeutic technologies continue to evolve rapidly, and both individual practitioners and clinical teams face increasingly complex ethical decisions. Unfortunately, the current state of medical knowledge does not provide the guidance to make the majority of clinical decisions on the basis of evidence. The present research infrastructure is inefficient and frequently produces unreliable results that cannot be replicated. Even randomized controlled trials (RCTs), the traditional gold standards of the research reliability hierarchy, are not without limitations. They can be costly, labor intensive, and slow, and can return results that are seldom generalizable to every patient population. Furthermore, many pertinent but unresolved clinical and medical systems issues do not seem to have attracted the interest of the research enterprise, which has come to focus instead on cellular and molecular investigations and single-agent (e.g., a drug or device) effects. For clinicians, the end result is a bit of a “data desert” when it comes to making decisions. The new research infrastructure proposed in this book will help the medical profession to make ethically sound and well informed decisions for their patients.

This User’s Guide is intended to support the design, implementation, analysis, interpretation, and quality evaluation of registries created to increase understanding of patient outcomes. For the purposes of this guide, a patient registry is an organized system that uses observational study methods to collect uniform data (clinical and other) to evaluate specified outcomes for a population defined by a particular disease, condition, or exposure, and that serves one or more predetermined scientific, clinical, or policy purposes. A registry database is a file (or files) derived from the registry. Although registries can serve many purposes, this guide focuses on registries created for one or more of the following purposes: to describe the natural history of disease, to determine clinical effectiveness or cost-effectiveness of health care products and services, to measure or monitor safety and harm, and/or to measure quality of care. Registries are classified according to how their populations are defined. For example, product registries include patients who have been exposed to biopharmaceutical products or medical devices. Health services registries consist of patients who have had a common procedure, clinical encounter, or hospitalization. Disease or condition registries are defined by patients having the same diagnosis, such as cystic fibrosis or heart failure. The User’s Guide was created by researchers affiliated with AHRQ’s Effective Health Care Program, particularly those who participated in AHRQ’s DEcIDE (Developing Evidence to Inform Decisions About Effectiveness) program. Chapters were subject to multiple internal and external independent reviews.

This open access book describes the results of natural language processing and machine learning methods applied to clinical text from electronic patient records. It is divided into twelve chapters. Chapters 1-4 discuss the history and background of the original paper-based patient records, their purpose, and how they are written and structured. These initial chapters do not require any technical or medical background knowledge. The remaining eight chapters are more technical in nature and describe various medical classifications and terminologies such as ICD diagnosis codes, SNOMED CT, MeSH, UMLS, and ATC. Chapters 5-10 cover basic tools for natural language processing and information retrieval, and how to apply them to clinical text. The difference between rule-based and machine learning-based methods, as well as between supervised and unsupervised machine learning methods, are also explained. Next, ethical concerns regarding the use of sensitive patient records for research purposes are discussed, including methods for de-identifying electronic patient records and safely storing patient records. The book’s closing chapters present a number of applications in clinical text mining and summarise the lessons learned from the previous chapters. The book provides a comprehensive overview of technical issues arising in clinical text mining, and offers a valuable guide for advanced students in health informatics, computational linguistics, and information retrieval, and for researchers entering these fields.

This open access book explores ways to leverage information technology and machine learning to combat disease and promote health, especially in resource-constrained settings. It focuses on digital disease surveillance through the application of machine learning to non-traditional data sources. Developing countries are uniquely prone to large-scale emerging infectious disease outbreaks due to disruption of ecosystems, civil unrest, and poor healthcare infrastructure – and without comprehensive surveillance, delays in outbreak identification, resource deployment, and case management can be catastrophic. In combination with context-informed analytics, students will learn how non-traditional digital disease data sources – including news media, social media, Google Trends, and Google Street View – can fill critical knowledge gaps and help inform on-the-ground decision-making when formal surveillance systems are insufficient.

The purpose of the book is to provide an overview of clinical research (types), activities, and areas where informatics and IT could fit into various activities and business practices. This book will introduce and apply informatics concepts only as they have particular relevance to clinical research settings.

Deep Learning Techniques for Biomedical and Health Informatics provides readers with the state-of-the-art in deep learning-based methods for biomedical and health informatics. The book covers not only the best-performing methods, it also presents implementation methods. The book includes all the prerequisite methodologies in each chapter so that new researchers and practitioners will find it very useful. Chapters go from basic methodology to advanced methods, including detailed descriptions of proposed approaches and comprehensive critical discussions on experimental results and how they are applied to Biomedical Engineering, Electronic Health Records, and medical image processing. - Examines a wide range of Deep Learning applications for Biomedical Engineering and Health Informatics, including Deep Learning for drug discovery, clinical decision support systems, disease diagnosis, prediction and monitoring - Discusses Deep Learning applied to Electronic Health Records (EHR), including health data structures and management, deep patient similarity learning, natural language processing, and how to improve clinical decision-making - Provides detailed coverage of Deep Learning for medical image processing, including optimizing medical big data, brain image analysis, brain tumor segmentation in MRI imaging, and the future of biomedical image analysis

Providing a comprehensive foundation for planning, executing, and monitoring public health research of all types, this book goes beyond traditional epidemiologic research designs to cover technology-based approaches emerging in the new public health landscape.

Most industries have plunged into data automation, but health care organizations have lagged in moving patients' medical records from paper to computers. In its first edition, this book presented a blueprint for introducing the computer-based patient record (CPR). The revised edition adds new information to the original book. One section describes recent developments, including the creation of a computer-based patient record institute. An international chapter highlights what is new in this still-emerging technology. An expert committee explores the potential of machine-readable CPRs to improve diagnostic and care decisions, provide a database for policymaking, and much more, addressing these key questions: Who uses patient records? What technology is available and what further research is necessary to meet users' needs? What should government, medical organizations, and others do to make the transition to CPRs? The volume also explores such issues as privacy and confidentiality, costs, the need for training, legal barriers to CPRs, and other key topics.

Biomedical engineering and health informatics are closely related to each other, and it is often difficult to tell where one ends and the other begins, but ICT systems in healthcare and biomedical systems and devices are already becoming increasingly interconnected, and share the common entity of data. This is something which is set to become even more prevalent in future, and will complete the chain and flow of information from the sensor, via processing, to the actuator, which may be anyone or anything from a human healthcare professional to a robot. Methods for automating the processing of information, such as signal processing, machine learning, predictive analytics and decision support, are increasingly important for providing actionable information and supporting personalized and preventive healthcare protocols in both biomedical and digital healthcare systems and applications. This book of proceedings presents 50 papers from the 12th eHealth conference, eHealth2018, held in Vienna, Austria, in May 2018. The theme of this year’s conference is Biomedical Meets eHealth – From Sensors to Decisions, and the papers included here cover a wide range of topics from the field of eHealth. The book will be of interest to all those working to design and implement healthcare today.

Drug Utilization Research (DUR) is an eclectic scientific discipline, integrating descriptive and analytical methods for the quantification, understanding and evaluation of the processes of prescribing, dispensing and consumption of medicines and for the testing of interventions to enhance the quality of these processes. The discipline is closely related and linked mainly to the broader field of pharmacoepidemiology, but also to health outcomes research, pharmacovigilance and health economics. Drug Utilization Research is a unique, practical guide to the assessment and evaluation of prescribing practices and to interventions to improve the use of medicines in populations. Edited by an international expert team from the International Society for Pharmacoepidemiology (ISPE), DUR is the only title to cover both the methodology and applications of drug utilization research and covers areas such as health policy, specific populations, therapeutics and adherence.