OBJECTIVE: To lay the groundwork for a better understanding of patient views on medical confidentiality. DESIGN: Studies were found by searching medline, bioethicsline, and selected bibliographies. Articles concerning physician perspectives or implications of legal and administrative regulations were excluded. Only peer-reviewed journal articles reporting original research on patients' confidentiality views ...

Ambulatory care federal pharmacists may be readily used by beneficiaries to obtain verbal and written pharmaceutical and/or medical information because of their high visibility and accessibility. In addition to information provided for prescription medications, pharmacists may provide medication and disease information through a patient education center. A patient education center ...

We investigate quantum games in which the information is asymmetrically distributed among the players and find that the possibility of the quantum game outperforming its classical counterpart depends strongly on not only the entanglement but also the informational asymmetry. What is more interesting, when the information distribution is asymmetric, is ...

OBJECTIVES: To assess Internet use and perceptions of formation reliability by parents in a neonatal intensive care unit (NICU). STUDY DESIGN: A standardized questionnaire study. RESULTS: A total of 100 parents were approached and 90% participated. In all, 79% owned a computer, 85.5% had Internet access, and 75.5% regularly spent ...

OBJECTIVE: To assess Internet use among a group of Brazilian pediatricians and otolaryngologists and to inquire about possible Web based medical resources. METHODS: Questionnaires were distributed among attendees of a 2001 Pediatric Otolaryngology meeting in Brazil. Multiple choice or yes/no questions related to the use of the Internet among physicians ...

Information about asbestos issues at the national level was compiled for ten Asian countries (China, Indonesia, Japan, Korea, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore, Taiwan, Thailand, and Vietnam) regarding 1) bans and consumption levels; 2) occupational exposure limits (OELs) and medical follow-up schemes; and 3) statistics and compensation status of asbestosis and mesothelioma ...

The usefulness of the Internet to the medical profession is growing rapidly. As the use of the Internet connectivity spreads, accessibility to more medical and biomedical resources is facilitated. This device if properly used can offer, free of charge, a large number of programs in the realm of health sciences. ...

PURPOSE: "Medication administration hassles" are the minor daily irritants that family caregivers experience when they assist a dependent family member with medication regimens. This study was designed to develop and test a multidimensional measure of the hassles in family caregiver medication administration. DESIGN AND METHOD: The authors employed a multiphase ...

One of the recurring obstacles to the successful completion of a medical audit cycle is the unavailability of accurate and complete information. This is particularly evident in the review of clinical processes, where the hand-written medical record is the source of information. We have attempted to bypass this information deficit ...

The Sharp HealthCare, San Diego, web site, a winner of the 2002 Medicine on the Net Web Excellence Award, provides a wealth of information without wasting space or confusing the visitor. The web site, www.sharp.com, can be viewed in both English and Spanish, a valuable consideration for those living in ...

The continuing education is a challenge for health care professionals, considering the growing amount and variable quality of information in this field. In this context, we developed a method allowing clinicians to have a centralised access to the best current medical evidence supporting medical decision-making. Relevant data has been gathered ...

BACKGROUND: This review addresses the impact of information technology and the Internet on the current and future practice of neurology. Information technology is influencing medical practice in ways that could be both beneficial and harmful. Scenarios are presented to depict some of the ways in which the practice of neurology ...

The Internet is a massively expanding body of information which includes medical resources. It is easier than in the past for anyone with some knowledge and effort to access the Internet. Medical professionals as well as patients have a similar ability to research a medical topic through the Internet. As ...

As the long-awaited HIPAA privacy regulations finally take effect this week, the question remains as to just how warmly consumers will respond to the raft of new federal rules governing control of medical information. The adjustment period may be lengthy for these complex regulations, but the new rules certainly will ...

The medical responsibility has been clearly defined in the Royal Decree no. 78 dated November 11, 1967 concerning the medical practice. Moreover, several articles from the Ethical Code (Code de Déontologie) have clarified some social and economical responsibilities in the medical practice (articles 99 to 103) and the quality of ...

Starting as a small military and academic network, the Internet has gradually evolved into a worldwide web, which connects most local networks as well as millions of personal computers from individual users. It is of interest to the medical practitioner, that ever more biomedical resources are becoming available on-line to ...

The Veterans Health Administration of the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs has a long, successful, and interesting history of using information technology to meet its mission. Each medical center is computerized to a degree that surprises the uninitiated. For example, medical documentation and ordering are computerized at every facility. A ...

OBJECTIVES: To explore patient views on access to a variety of information in the medical record by the on-call general practitioner and by the practice assistant in relation to the perceived importance of this information for the personal doctor. To relate patient views to patient and practice characteristics. DESIGN: Postal ...

BACKGROUND: The Internet provides consumers with access to online health information; however, identifying relevant and valid information can be problematic. Our objectives were firstly to investigate the efficiency of search-engines, and then to assess the quality of online information pertaining to androgen deficiency in the ageing male (ADAM). METHODS: Keyword ...

It may be argued that medical information systems are subject to the same type of threats and compromises that plague general information systems, and that it does not require special attention from a research viewpoint. The firsthand experience of experts in information security and assurance who studied or worked with ...

Many accounts of informed consent in medical ethics claim that it is valuable because it supports individual autonomy. Unfortunately there are many distinct conceptions of individual autonomy, and their ethical importance varies. A better reason for taking informed consent seriously is that it provides assurance that patients and others are ...

BACKGROUND: Internet websites and medical telephone helplines are relatively new and huge resources of medical information ("cybermedicine" and "telemedicine", respectively) accessible to the general public without prior recourse to a doctor. STUDY OBJECTIVES: To measure use of internet websites and of the NHS Direct telephone helpline as sources of medical ...

Against a background of increasing regulation regarding access to medical information and the presentation of patients' confidentiality, the case of genetic information raises interesting questions about whether the application of general rules is appropriate in all situations. Whilst all genetic information is not equally sensitive, some of it is highly ...

Informed consent is one of the fundamental rights of a patient. However it used to be ignored in mainland China and was neither academically discussed nor a matter of practical concern until recent years. Paternalism was dominant in the practice of traditional Chinese medicine which was intensely influenced by Confucianism. ...

Correct spelling is crucial for online search engines to function well, and health information is highly sought after online. We propose a technique for increasing the effectiveness of spell-checking tools for use with medical queries. Our results show a marked improvement in the ranking of the correct term within the ...

PD(X)MD is a new and promising evidence-based electronic primary care clinical information resource. It is geared primarily to the physician, as is its companion database, MDConsult, but it can also be very useful to medical and non-medical librarians seeking to quickly summarize current, accurate, and quality-filtered clinical information focusing on ...

With the rapid growth in medical knowledge, physicians' ability to keep up to date has become increasingly difficult. Although the Internet brought significant improvements in access to medical knowledge, there are still problems remaining, particularly for the mobile physician who is unable to perform time-consuming on-line searches, even with wireless ...

Bringing all available evidence on therapy efficacy to users is a necessary step in the evidence-based medicine paradigm. Today, the needs of physicians in medical information, including therapeutic information, are not met. Further, the information reaching the doctors is rarely consistent with the available evidence. The growth rate of emerging ...

The healthcare environment consists of vast amounts of dynamic and unstructured information, distributed over a large number of information systems. Mobile agent technology is having an ever-growing impact on the delivery of medical information. It supports acquiring and manipulating information distributed in a large number of information systems. Moreover is ...

OBJECTIVES: To model and implement a medical web portal providing access to well qualified and high-quality information. MATERIAL AND METHODS: The Unified Medical Language System (UMLS) knowledge sources of the U.S. National Library of Medicine and an Information Sources Catalog (ISC) resulting from the ARIANE project are described. The XML ...

The UMVF (French Virtual Medical University) has many heterogeneous resources hosted by the servers of university partners of the project. One of its objectives is to develop an efficient tool to perform a single search on these resources. We first defined a standardized and interoperable indexing method. For each document, ...

OBJECTIVE: To determine use of botanical dietary supplements (BDS) in women between the ages of 40 and 60 years at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) clinics, including information about commonly used BDS, the reason for use, information resources used, and the overall perception of safety and efficacy of ...

Strangulation accounts for 10% of all violent deaths in the United States. Many people who are strangled survive. These survivors may have minimal visible external findings. Because of the slowly compressive nature of the forces involved in strangulation, clinicians should be aware of the potential for significant complications including laryngeal ...

The process of transmitting patient medical information between different healthcare parties involves harmonizing multiple elements: addresses, certificates, patient IDs, communication protocol, message format, and documents/EPR to be exchanged. Beyond the work done at the "information structure level" within CEN TC251, ISO TC215, HL7 and DICOM, it is necessary to focus ...

Medical information, which is the central notion in medical informatics, covers a large scale of structures and forms. Several classifications are possible and two criteria have been used in this paper: structural level and informational level. According to structural level we can distinguish three major areas: bioinformatics and neuroinformatics for ...

OBJECTIVE: This study presents the results of an author co-citation analysis of the interdisciplinary field of medical informatics. METHODS: An author co-citation analysis was conducted for the years 1994 to 1998, using the fifty most-cited American College of Medical Informatics fellows as an author population. Co-citation data were calculated for ...

Medical knowledge expands at a pace that makes it impossible for the individual clinician to keep up, especially for medications. Medication-related queries are the most common type of query that typically go unanswered during the course of providing care.1 Unanswered questions may result in errors, as found in one study ...

This study evaluated Internet use among orthopaedic patients in a private practice general orthopaedic setting. Of 201 participants, 45% had used the Internet either personally or thru a surrogate to search for information about their orthopaedic condition. Utilization of the Internet was significantly higher than that reported for a community ...

The Health and Human Services (HHS) regulations on medical records, approved by the Clinton administration in December 2000, and by the Bush administration in April 2001, improved confidentiality protection from the preliminary rule by incorporating fair information practices, consent and minimal necessary disclosures provisions. The Fall 2002 removal of the ...

Staying current with advances in medicine is becoming a major challenge for clinicians. Access to updated repositories of medical information and the expertise to locate relevant information within them are becoming necessary clinical skills. PubMed (http://www.pubmedgov) provides free access to the largest biomedical resource available and is updated daily. Clinicians ...

In the context of current evolution of healthcare, hospitals will have to share medical files with different structures. Thus, it is necessary to establish procedures to identify the patients. A team professionals working with such medical information proposes a system of identification based on the matching of identification traits respecting ...

It is very likely that digital resources will be the primary source materials of the historians of the future. After 550 years, printing on paper is no longer the only means of information transfer. This paper summarises some of the new ways of digitally disseminating medical information before using the ...

Increasingly, medical information is being stored, accessed, and communicated electronically, which makes this information vulnerable to breaches in security and privacy. Clinicians must be familiar with the best practices for keeping medical information private, as well as the local, state, and federal regulations that govern the security, privacy and patient-identifiable ...

State laws and accreditation requirements dictate the form, ownership, and substance of medical records, as well as requirements for storage, access, and confidentiality. There are limited exceptions to these requirements but they are highly circumscribed. Federal law also outlines requirements to ensure the privacy of patient-identifiable information. Thus, providers must ...

Due to the Internet technology, hundreds of Web sites are accessible for medical information, and the retrieval of such information is quite rapid. Once you as a consumer obtain all of this information, how do you determine whether the information you are looking at is valid and current and even ...

During recent years medical information through Internet is increasingly available to both patients and professionals and ever more biomedical resources become available on line to assist in clinical medicine, education and research. The purpose of this article is to present a detailed list of all the worldwide web sites of ...

During recent years, the Internet has evolved into the largest computer network in the world, allowing access to vast amounts of information and services. Medical information is increasingly available to both patients and professionals, and ever more biomedical resources are becoming available on-line to assist in research, clinical medicine, and ...

The purpose of this study is to utilize the strategy of multiple solutions with easily operated tools to make compatible and affordable trustworthy results. This strategy can satisfy general users in extracting specific knowledge (e.g. diagnosis, treatment, health education, hospital administration, etc.). Wide application is one of the key promoters ...

The Internet provides a unique opportunity for marketing a medical practice. By demonstrating a commitment to good doctor-patient communication, by providing helpful background information, and by facilitating office workflow, a Web site can be a cost-effective way to enhance any practice. This chapter examines the basics of implementing an Internet ...

OBJECTIVE: The author provides an overview of the current status of privacy in psychiatric treatment, with particular attention to the effects of new federal regulations authorized by the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA). METHOD: The author reviews the ethical and legal underpinnings for medical privacy, including the empirical ...