American Medical Informatics Association Research Articles

Persisting symptoms after concussion: Time for a paradigm shift.

Persisting symptoms after concussion: Time for a paradigm shift.

Identification of the most important external features of highly cited scholarly papers through 3 (i.e., Ridge, Lasso, and Boruta) feature selection data mining methods

Highly cited papers are influenced by external factors that are not directly related to the document's intrinsic quality. In this study, 50 characteristics for measuring the performance of 68 highly cited papers, from the Journal of The American Medical Informatics Association indexed in Web of Science (WOS), from 2009 to 2019 were investigated. In the first step, a Pearson correlation analysis is performed to eliminate variables with zero or weak correlation with the target (“dependent”) variable (number of citations in WOS). Consequently, 32 variables are selected for the next step. By applying the Ridge technique, 13 features show a positive effect on the number of citations. Using three different algorithms, i.e., Ridge, Lasso, and Boruta, 6 factors appear to be the most relevant ones. The "Number of citations by international researchers", "Journal self-citations in citing documents”, and "Authors' self-citations in citing documents”, are recognized as the most important features by all three methods here used. The "First author's scientific age”, "Open-access paper”, and "Number of first author's citations in WOS" are identified as the important features of highly cited papers by only two methods, Ridge and Lasso. Notice that we use specific machine learning algorithms as feature selection methods (Ridge, Lasso, and Boruta) to identify the most important features of highly cited papers, tools that had not previously been used for this purpose. In conclusion, we re-emphasize the performance resulting from such algorithms. Moreover, we do not advise authors to seek to increase the citations of their articles by manipulating the identified performance features. Indeed, ethical rules regarding these characteristics must be strictly obeyed.

Assessing perceived effectiveness of career development efforts led by the women in American Medical Informatics Association Initiative.

We sought to ascertain perceived factors affecting women's career development efforts in the American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA) and to provide recommendations for improvements. Data were collected using a 27-item survey administered via the AMIA newsletter and other social channels. Survey questions comprised 3 demographics, 15 Likert-scale, and 9 open-ended items. Likert-scale responses were summarized across respondent ages, career stages, and career domains, and open-ended responses were thematically analyzed. We received survey responses from 109 AMIA women members. Our findings demonstrate that AMIA had made strides in promoting career development, and the most effective AMIA efforts included social events (83%), panel discussions (80%), and scientific sessions (79%). However, despite these efforts, women members perceived that gender-specific challenges persisted within AMIA, and recognized the need for increased networking opportunities (96%), raising awareness of gender-specific challenges (95%), and encouraging gender proportional representation in leadership (92%). International and national biomedical informatics professional communities have put forth efforts to address gender-specific issues in career development. Yet, our study identified that some of these, including the deep-rooted gender power hierarchy and bias, are still perceived as profound in AMIA. Even though existing career development efforts for women are highly effective, important perceived gender-specific career development issues require further attention and investigation to improve existing AMIA activities.

Selecting venues for AMIA events and conferences: guiding ethical principles.

A discussion and debate on the American Medical Informatics Association's (AMIA) Ethical, Legal, and Social Issues (ELSI) Working Group listserv in 2021 raised important issues related to a forthcoming conference in Texas. Texas had recently enacted a restrictive abortion law and restricted voting rights. Several AMIA members advocated for a boycott of the state and the scheduled conference. The discussion led the AMIA Board of Directors to request that the organization's Ethics Committee provide general guidance for principle-based venue selection. This document recommends overarching principles for the venue selection for future AMIA events and conferences. Discussions by the AMIA Board, the Ethics Committee, and the ELSI Working Group informed these recommendations, and this document on guiding principles was approved by the AMIA Board of Directors in April 2022.

Donald A.B. Lindberg, pioneer in biomedical and health informatics: His involvement in creating professional organizations.

Among the many contributions of Donald A.B. Lindberg was his work on behalf of a variety or professional organizations in the field of biomedical and health informatics. These began during his early days at the University of Missouri and continued throughout his 30 years at the National Library of Medicine. This chapter summarizes that work, which occurred both through his personal efforts and through the impact of the NLM under his leadership. Examples include his role in the development of organizations themselves (e.g., the International Medical Informatics Association, the American College of Medical Informatics, and the American Medical Informatics Association) and also his contributions to the professional scientific meetings that have advanced the field (e.g., the Symposium on Computer Applications in Medical Care, MEDINFO, and the AMIA Annual Symposium).

A tribute to Karen Greenwood and her contributions to the American Medical Informatics Association

After 25 years of service to the American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA), Ms Karen Greenwood, the Executive Vice President and Chief Operating Officer, is leaving the organization. In this perspective, we reflect on her accomplishments and her effect on the organization and the field of informatics nationally and globally. We also express our appreciation and gratitude for Ms Greenwood's role at AMIA.

A Data-Driven Assessment of the U.S. Health Informatics Programs and Job Market.

Health Informatics (HI) is an interdisciplinary field, integrating health sciences, computer science, information science, and cognitive science to assist health information management, analysis, and utilization. As the HI field is broad, it is impossible that a student will be able to master all the diverse HI topics. Thus, it is important to train the HI students based on the offering of the various HI programs and needs of the current market. This project will study the U.S. HI programs, training materials, HI job market, the skillset required by the employers, competencies taught in HI programs, and comparisons between them. We collected the training information for the 238 U.S. universities that offered MS, PhD, or postbaccalaureate certificate programs in HI or related professions. Next, we explored the HI job market by randomly checking 200 jobs and their required skillsets and domain knowledge. Then, we compared these skillsets with those offered by the HI programs and identified the gaps and overlaps for program enhancements. Among the 238 U.S. universities, 94 universities offer HI programs: 92 universities with MS (Master of Science), 43 with doctoral, 42 with both MS and doctoral, and 54 with certificate programs. The most offered HI courses are related to practicum, data analytics, research, and ethics. For the HI job postings, the three most technical skillsets required in HI job posting are data analysis, database management, and knowledge of electronic health records. However, only 58% of HI programs offer courses in database management and analytics. Compared with American Medical Informatics Association's recommended 10 fundamental domains, the HI curriculum generally lacks training in socio-technical systems, social-behavioral aspects of health, and interprofessional collaborative practice. There are gaps between the industry expectations of HI and the training received in HI programs. Advance level technical courses are needed in HI programs to meet industry expectations.

Donald A.B. Lindberg, Pioneer in Biomedical and Health Informatics: His Involvement in Creating Professional Organizations.

Among the many contributions of Donald A.B. Lindberg was his work on behalf of a variety or professional organizations in the field of biomedical and health informatics. These began during his early days at the University of Missouri and continued throughout his 30 years at the National Library of Medicine. This chapter summarizes that work, which occurred both through his personal efforts and through the impact of the NLM under his leadership. Examples include his role in the development of organizations themselves (e.g., the International Medical Informatics Association, the American College of Medical Informatics, and the American Medical Informatics Association) and also his contributions to the professional scientific meetings that have advanced the field (e.g., the Symposium on Computer Applications in Medical Care, MEDINFO, and the AMIA Annual Symposium).

Scientometric mapping of global publication trends in health informatics domain

Purpose: Over the last two decades, health informatics has garnered much attention with a rapid increase in the research output. This study aims to review and evaluate the global progress in the Health Informatics domain and assess the scholarly publication productivity. Design/Methodology: Based on data from the Web of Science databases, scientometric methods and knowledge visualization techniques were applied to evaluate the global trends, perform thematic analysis, identify gaps in knowledge and predict future trends of the health informatics domain from 2009 to 2021. Findings: The findings revealed that the field of Health Informatics has increased rapidly over the last decade. 3856 publications were produced from 2009 to 2021 and have gradually increased from 4.85% in 2009 to 69.63% in 2021 North American continent had the highest productivity with 63.38% global publication share out of 3856. USA (58.35%), Canada (7.62%) Australia (5.44%), and China (4.12%) were the leading countries with the highest publication productivity. Journal of The American Medical Informatics Association published by the American Medical Informatics Association is the leading journal with impact factor 3.428 (2018) and 236 publications. Harvard University was the leading position with 6.40% of publications. The United States Department of Health and Human Services is the leading funding body it has funded 782 publications. Conclusions: These findings will provide evidence of the current status and trends in Health Informatics all over the world, thus, helping scientific researchers and policymakers understand the panorama of Health Informatics and predict the dynamic directions of research.

Is Electronic Health Record Safety a Paradox?

Is Electronic Health Record Safety a Paradox?

Making the case for workforce diversity in biomedical informatics to help achieve equity-centered care: a look at the AMIA First Look Program.

Developing a diverse informatics workforce broadens the research agenda and ensures the growth of innovative solutions that enable equity-centered care. The American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA) established the AMIA First Look Program in 2017 to address workforce disparities among women, including those from marginalized communities. The program exposes women to informatics, furnishes mentors, and provides career resources. In 4 years, the program has introduced 87 undergraduate women, 41% members of marginalized communities, to informatics. Participants from the 2019 and 2020 cohorts reported interest in pursuing a career in informatics increased from 57% to 86% after participation, and 86% of both years’ attendees responded that they would recommend the program to others. A June 2021 LinkedIn profile review found 50% of participants working in computer science or informatics, 4% pursuing informatics graduate degrees, and 32% having completed informatics internships, suggesting AMIA First Look has the potential to increase informatics diversity.

Design and evaluation of a Women in American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA) leadership program.

The objective is to report on the design and evaluation of the inaugural Women in AMIA Leadership Program. A year-long leadership curriculum was developed. Survey responses were summarized with descriptive statistics and quotes selected. Twenty-four scholars participated in the program. There was a significant increase in perceived achievement of learning objectives after the program (P < .0001). The largest improvement was in leadership confidence and presence in work interactions (modal answer Neutral in presurvey from 21 responses rose to Agree in postsurvey from 24 responses). Most (92% of 13) scholars clarified leadership vision and goals and (83% of 18) would be Very Likely to recommend the program to others. The goals of the program-developing women's leader identity, increasing networks, and accumulating experience for future programs-were achieved. The second leadership program is on its way in the United States and Australia. This study may benefit organizations seeking to develop leadership programs for women in informatics and digital health.

Gender representation in U.S. biomedical informatics leadership and recognition.

This study sought to describe gender representation in leadership and recognition within the U.S. biomedical informatics community. Data were collected from public websites or provided by American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA) personnel from 2017 to 2019, including gender of membership, directors of academic informatics programs, clinical informatics subspecialty fellowships, AMIA leadership (2014-2019), and AMIA awardees (1993-2019). Differences in gender proportions were calculated using chi-square tests. Men were more often in leadership positions and award recipients (P < .01). Men led 74.7% (n = 71 of 95) of academic informatics programs and 83.3% (n = 35 of 42) of clinical informatics fellowships. Within AMIA, men held 56.8% (n = 1086 of 1913) of leadership roles and received 64.1% (n = 59 of 92) of awards. As in other STEM fields, leadership and recognition in biomedical informatics is lower for women. Quantifying gender inequity should inform data-driven strategies to foster diversity and inclusion. Standardized collection and surveillance of demographic data within biomedical informatics is necessary.

Applied Interdisciplinary Theory in Health Informatics: A Book Review.

Applied Interdisciplinary Theory in Health Informatics: A Book Review.

Measuring success: perspectives from three optimization programs on assessing impact in the age of burnout.

Electronic health record (EHR) optimization has been identified as a best practice to reduce burnout and improve user satisfaction; however, measuring success can be challenging. The goal of this manuscript is to describe the limitations of measuring optimizations and opportunities to combine assessments for a more comprehensive evaluation of optimization outcomes. The authors review lessons from 3 U.S. healthcare institutions that presented their experiences and recommendations at the American Medical Informatics Association 2020 Clinical Informatics conference, describing uses and limitations of vendor time-based reports and surveys utilized in optimization programs. Compiling optimization outcomes supports a multi-faceted approach that can produce assessments even as time-based reports and technology change. The authors recommend that objective measures of optimization must be combined with provider and clinician-defined value to provide long term improvements in user satisfaction and reduce EHR-related burnout.

The 2019 n2c2/OHNLP Track on Clinical Semantic Textual Similarity: Overview.

BackgroundSemantic textual similarity is a common task in the general English domain to assess the degree to which the underlying semantics of 2 text segments are equivalent to each other. Clinical Semantic Textual Similarity (ClinicalSTS) is the semantic textual similarity task in the clinical domain that attempts to measure the degree of semantic equivalence between 2 snippets of clinical text. Due to the frequent use of templates in the Electronic Health Record system, a large amount of redundant text exists in clinical notes, making ClinicalSTS crucial for the secondary use of clinical text in downstream clinical natural language processing applications, such as clinical text summarization, clinical semantics extraction, and clinical information retrieval.ObjectiveOur objective was to release ClinicalSTS data sets and to motivate natural language processing and biomedical informatics communities to tackle semantic text similarity tasks in the clinical domain.MethodsWe organized the first BioCreative/OHNLP ClinicalSTS shared task in 2018 by making available a real-world ClinicalSTS data set. We continued the shared task in 2019 in collaboration with National NLP Clinical Challenges (n2c2) and the Open Health Natural Language Processing (OHNLP) consortium and organized the 2019 n2c2/OHNLP ClinicalSTS track. We released a larger ClinicalSTS data set comprising 1642 clinical sentence pairs, including 1068 pairs from the 2018 shared task and 1006 new pairs from 2 electronic health record systems, GE and Epic. We released 80% (1642/2054) of the data to participating teams to develop and fine-tune the semantic textual similarity systems and used the remaining 20% (412/2054) as blind testing to evaluate their systems. The workshop was held in conjunction with the American Medical Informatics Association 2019 Annual Symposium.ResultsOf the 78 international teams that signed on to the n2c2/OHNLP ClinicalSTS shared task, 33 produced a total of 87 valid system submissions. The top 3 systems were generated by IBM Research, the National Center for Biotechnology Information, and the University of Florida, with Pearson correlations of r=.9010, r=.8967, and r=.8864, respectively. Most top-performing systems used state-of-the-art neural language models, such as BERT and XLNet, and state-of-the-art training schemas in deep learning, such as pretraining and fine-tuning schema, and multitask learning. Overall, the participating systems performed better on the Epic sentence pairs than on the GE sentence pairs, despite a much larger portion of the training data being GE sentence pairs.ConclusionsThe 2019 n2c2/OHNLP ClinicalSTS shared task focused on computing semantic similarity for clinical text sentences generated from clinical notes in the real world. It attracted a large number of international teams. The ClinicalSTS shared task could continue to serve as a venue for researchers in natural language processing and medical informatics communities to develop and improve semantic textual similarity techniques for clinical text.

Bibliometric mapping of top papers in Library and Information Science based on the Essential Science Indicators Database

This study analyzed top papers published in the field of Library and Information Science (LIS) published between 2009 and 2019 and included in the Web of Science (WoS) subject category “Information Science &amp; Library Science”. Data of the 501 top papers were extracted from the Essential Science Indicators (ESI) database comprising 499 highly cited papers and 16 hot papers in the field. The distributions of document type, language of publication, scientific output, and publication of journals are reported in this paper. The co-authorship network visualization of authors, organizations and countries, co-occurrence network visualization of all keywords are visualized using VOSviewer software. The 501 papers, all written in English language, were from 1,579 authors employed at 680 organizations based in 59 countries/territories. The papers were published in 40 journals in the field. The top 5 core journals ranked based on the impact factor (IF) were MIS Quarterly, Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association, International Journal of Information Management, Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology, and Information Management. The top 5 organizations were University of Maryland (USA), University of Wolverhampton (UK), Vanderbilt University (USA), Indiana University (USA), and Wuhan University (China). Authors from the following countries contributed the most - USA, People’s Republic of China, England, Canada and Netherlands. Based on network map using VOSviewer, there were micro, meso and macro level collaborations based on common interests in a specific topics. Analysis of all keywords showed that the research were distributed into 6 clusters. This study concludes that one important characteristic of top papers is the journal reputation, therefore authors can choose their ideal journal with a high JIF and quartile to publish papers in the English language related to this research field.

Recommendations for patient similarity classes: results of the AMIA 2019 workshop on defining patient similarity

Defining patient-to-patient similarity is essential for the development of precision medicine in clinical care and research. Conceptually, the identification of similar patient cohorts appears straightforward; however, universally accepted definitions remain elusive. Simultaneously, an explosion of vendors and published algorithms have emerged and all provide varied levels of functionality in identifying patient similarity categories. To provide clarity and a common framework for patient similarity, a workshop at the American Medical Informatics Association 2019 Annual Meeting was convened. This workshop included invited discussants from academics, the biotechnology industry, the FDA, and private practice oncology groups. Drawing from a broad range of backgrounds, workshop participants were able to coalesce around 4 major patient similarity classes: (1) feature, (2) outcome, (3) exposure, and (4) mixed-class. This perspective expands into these 4 subtypes more critically and offers the medical informatics community a means of communicating their work on this important topic.

P52 A baseline review of the activity of the PICU pharmacists using electronically captured data

AimTo date there are no metrics for the clinical pharmacist service to PICU. It is accepted that use of a Clinical Information Management System (CIMS) has a role in medication safety,1 however there are few studies that review the information potential of a CIMS for collecting pharmacist activity.2MethodAdditional fields and custom reports were configured in the CIMS to enable PICU pharmacists to record their activity in the following areas:Medicines reconciliation within 72 hours of admission to PICUDischarge kardex reviewAnalgesia and sedation (A&amp;S) reviewClinical pharmacy reviewOther interventions &amp; medication error reporting continued as per normal practice. Data was analysed using Microsoft Excel®.ResultsComplete data was available from July 2017 to end of 2018.There were 1274 medicines reconciliations by a pharmacist within 72 hours of admission (78% admissions). 14% of discharge kardexes had been reviewed prior to discharge to the ward. There was an average of 190 pharmacy reviews per 100 bed days. A total of 780 Pharmacist A&amp;S Plans were documented by the clinical pharmacists – an average of 2 per working day, and 48% of admissions.Comparisons between each six month period showed a significant increase in the number of pharmacists medicines reconciliations (p&lt;0.001). No other differences were found.ConclusionThis study has shown that electronic tracking of pharmacist ward activity is possible. It has the potential to demonstrate compliance with external or internal standards and audits. This data continues to be collected, and therefore these results will be used as a baseline to compare future activity. The findings of this study may encourage other units to replicate, providing data that can be used for comparison. Further configuration of the CIMS to capture other metrics such as TDM, and document discrepancies in medicines reconciliation is planned.ReferencesForni A, Chu H, Fanikos J. Technology Utilization to Prevent Medication Errors. Current Drug Safety. 2010;5:13–18.Nelson S, Poikonen J, Reese T, El Halta D, Weir C. The pharmacist and the EHR. Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association. 2016;24:193–197.Health and Information Quality Authority. Guidance for health and social care providers; Principles of good practice in medication reconciliation. Dublin: HIQA; 2014

Celebrating G. Octo Barnett, MD.

Journal Article Celebrating G. Octo Barnett, MD Get access Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association, Volume 27, Issue 8, August 2020, Pages 1187–1189, https://doi.org/10.1093/jamia/ocaa170 Published: 15 July 2020 Article history Received: 08 July 2020 Accepted: 08 July 2020 Published: 15 July 2020