Background: Medical errors are becoming a major problem for health care providers and those who design health policies. These errors cause patients' illnesses to worsen over time and can make recovery impossible. For the benefit of patients and the welfare of health care providers, a decrease in these errors is required to maintain safe, high-quality patient care.
Objective: This study aimed to improve the ability of health care professionals to diagnose diseases and reduce medical errors.
Methods: Data collection was performed at Dr George Mukhari Academic Hospital using convenience sampling. In total, 300 health care professionals were given a self-administered questionnaire, including doctors, dentists, pharmacists, physiologists, and nurses. To test the study hypotheses, multiple linear regression was used to evaluate empirical data.
Results: In the sample of 300 health care professionals, no significant correlation was found between medical error reduction (MER) and knowledge quality (KQ) (β=.043, P=.48). A nonsignificant negative relationship existed between MER and information quality (IQ) (β=-.080, P=.19). However, a significant positive relationship was observed between MER and electronic health records (EHR; β=.125, 95% CI 0.005-0.245, P=.042).
Conclusions: Increasing patient access to medical records for health care professionals may significantly improve patient health and well-being. The effectiveness of health care organizations' operations can also be increased through better health information systems. To lower medical errors and enhance patient outcomes, policy makers should provide financing and support for EHR adoption as a top priority. Health care administrators should also concentrate on providing staff with the training they need to operate these systems efficiently. Empirical surveys in other public and private hospitals can be used to further test the validated survey instrument.
Background: Electronic health records (EHRs) commonly contain patient addresses that provide valuable data for geocoding and spatial analysis, enabling more comprehensive descriptions of individual patients for clinical purposes. Despite the widespread use of EHRs in clinical decision support and interventions, no systematic review has examined the extent to which spatial analysis is used to characterize patient phenotypes.
Objective: This study reviews advanced spatial analyses that used individual-level health data from EHRs within the United States to characterize patient phenotypes.
Methods: We systematically evaluated English-language, peer-reviewed studies from the PubMed/MEDLINE, Scopus, Web of Science, and Google Scholar databases from inception to August 20, 2023, without imposing constraints on study design or specific health domains.
Results: A substantial proportion of studies (>85%) were limited to geocoding or basic mapping without implementing advanced spatial statistical analysis, leaving only 49 studies that met the eligibility criteria. These studies used diverse spatial methods, with a predominant focus on clustering techniques, while spatiotemporal analysis (frequentist and Bayesian) and modeling were less common. A noteworthy surge (n=42, 86%) in publications was observed after 2017. The publications investigated a variety of adult and pediatric clinical areas, including infectious disease, endocrinology, and cardiology, using phenotypes defined over a range of data domains such as demographics, diagnoses, and visits. The primary health outcomes investigated were asthma, hypertension, and diabetes. Notably, patient phenotypes involving genomics, imaging, and notes were limited.
Conclusions: This review underscores the growing interest in spatial analysis of EHR-derived data and highlights knowledge gaps in clinical health, phenotype domains, and spatial methodologies. We suggest that future research should focus on addressing these gaps and harnessing spatial analysis to enhance individual patient contexts and clinical decision support.
Background: To advance research with clinical data, it is essential to make access to the available data as fast and easy as possible for researchers, which is especially challenging for data from different source systems within and across institutions. Over the years, many research repositories and data standards have been created. One of these is the Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) standard, used by the German Medical Informatics Initiative (MII) to harmonize and standardize data across university hospitals in Germany. One of the first steps to make these data available is to allow researchers to create feasibility queries to determine the data availability for a specific research question. Given the heterogeneity of different query languages to access different data across and even within standards such as FHIR (eg, CQL and FHIR Search), creating an intermediate query syntax for feasibility queries reduces the complexity of query translation and improves interoperability across different research repositories and query languages.
Objective: This study describes the creation and implementation of an intermediate query syntax for feasibility queries and how it integrates into the federated German health research portal (Forschungsdatenportal Gesundheit) and the MII.
Methods: We analyzed the requirements for feasibility queries and the feasibility tools that are currently available in research repositories. Based on this analysis, we developed an intermediate query syntax that can be easily translated into different research repository-specific query languages.
Results: The resulting Clinical Cohort Definition Language (CCDL) for feasibility queries combines inclusion criteria in a conjunctive normal form and exclusion criteria in a disjunctive normal form, allowing for additional filters like time or numerical restrictions. The inclusion and exclusion results are combined via an expression to specify feasibility queries. We defined a JSON schema for the CCDL, generated an ontology, and demonstrated the use and translatability of the CCDL across multiple studies and real-world use cases.
Conclusions: We developed and evaluated a structured query syntax for feasibility queries and demonstrated its use in a real-world example as part of a research platform across 39 German university hospitals.
Background: Electronic medical records (EMRs) contain large amounts of detailed clinical information. Using medical record review to identify conditions within large quantities of EMRs can be time-consuming and inefficient. EMR-based phenotyping using machine learning and natural language processing algorithms is a continually developing area of study that holds potential for numerous mental health disorders.
Objective: This review evaluates the current state of EMR-based case identification for depression and provides guidance on using current algorithms and constructing new ones.
Methods: A scoping review of EMR-based algorithms for phenotyping depression was completed. This research encompassed studies published from January 2000 to May 2023. The search involved 3 databases: Embase, MEDLINE, and APA PsycInfo. This was carried out using selected keywords that fell into 3 categories: terms connected with EMRs, terms connected to case identification, and terms pertaining to depression. This study adhered to the PRISMA-ScR (Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses extension for Scoping Reviews) guidelines.
Results: A total of 20 papers were assessed and summarized in the review. Most of these studies were undertaken in the United States, accounting for 75% (15/20). The United Kingdom and Spain followed this, accounting for 15% (3/20) and 10% (2/20) of the studies, respectively. Both data-driven and clinical rule-based methodologies were identified. The development of EMR-based phenotypes and algorithms indicates the data accessibility permitted by each health system, which led to varying performance levels among different algorithms.
Conclusions: Better use of structured and unstructured EMR components through techniques such as machine learning and natural language processing has the potential to improve depression phenotyping. However, more validation must be carried out to have confidence in depression case identification algorithms in general.
Background: Information control is a promising approach for managing surgical specimens. However, there is limited research evidence on surgical near misses. This is particularly true in the closed loop of information control for each link.
Objective: A new model of surgical specimen process management is further constructed, and a safe operating room nursing practice environment is created by intercepting specimen near-miss events through information safety barriers.
Methods: In a large hospital in China, 84,289 surgical specimens collected in the conventional information specimen management mode from January to December 2021 were selected as the control group, and 99,998 surgical specimens collected in the information safety barrier control surgical specimen management mode from January to December 2022 were selected as the improvement group. The incidence of near misses, the qualified rate of pathological specimen fixation, and the average time required for specimen fixation were compared under the 2 management modes. The causes of 2 groups of near misses were analyzed and the near misses of information safety barrier control surgical specimens were studied.
Results: Under the information-based safety barrier control surgical specimen management model, the incidence of adverse events in surgical specimens was reduced, the reporting of near-miss events in surgical specimens was improved by 100%, the quality control quality management of surgical specimens was effectively improved, the pass rate of surgical pathology specimen fixation was improved, and the meantime for surgical specimen fixation was shortened, with differences considered statistically significant at P<.05.
Conclusions: Our research has developed a new mode of managing the surgical specimen process. This mode can prevent errors in approaching specimens by implementing information security barriers, thereby enhancing the quality of specimen management, ensuring the safety of medical procedures, and improving the quality of hospital services.
Background: Over 200 health information exchanges (HIEs) are currently operational in Japan. The most common feature of HIEs is remote on-demand viewing or searching of aggregated patient health data from multiple institutions. However, the usage of this feature by individual users and institutions remains unknown.
Objective: This study aims to understand usage of the on-demand patient data viewing feature of large-scale HIEs by individual health care workers and institutions in Japan.
Methods: We conducted audit log analyses of large-scale HIEs. The research subjects were HIEs connected to over 100 institutions and with over 10,000 patients. Each health care worker's profile and audit log data for HIEs were collected. We conducted four types of analyses on the extracted audit log. First, we calculated the ratio of the number of days of active HIE use for each hospital-affiliated doctor account. Second, we calculated cumulative monthly usage days of HIEs by each institution in financial year (FY) 2021/22. Third, we calculated each facility type's monthly active institution ratio in FY2021/22. Fourth, we compared the monthly active institution ratio by medical institution for each HIE and the proportion of cumulative usage days by user type for each HIE.
Results: We identified 24 HIEs as candidates for data collection and we analyzed data from 7 HIEs. Among hospital doctors, 93.5% (7326/7833) had never used HIEs during the available period in FY2021/22, while 19 doctors used them at least 30% of days. The median (IQR) monthly active institution ratios were 0.482 (0.470-0.487) for hospitals, 0.243 (0.230-0.247) for medical clinics, and 0.030 (0.024-0.048) for dental clinics. In 51.9% (1781/3434) of hospitals, the cumulative monthly usage days of HIEs was 0, while in 26.8% (921/3434) of hospitals, it was between 1 and 10, and in 3% (103/3434) of hospitals, it was 100 or more. The median (IQR) monthly active institution ratio in medical institutions was 0.511 (0.487-0.529) for the most used HIE and 0.109 (0.0927-0.117) for the least used. The proportion of cumulative usage days of HIE by user type was complex for each HIE, and no consistent trends could be discerned.
Conclusions: In the large-scale HIEs surveyed in this study, the overall usage of the on-demand patient data viewing feature was low, consistent with past official reports. User-level analyses of audit logs revealed large disparities in the number of days of HIE use among health care workers and institutions. There were also large disparities in HIE use by facility type or HIE; the percentage of cumulative HIE usage days by user type also differed by HIE. This study indicates the need for further research into why there are large disparities in demand for HIEs in Japan as well as the need to design comprehensive audit logs that can be matched with other official datasets.