Browsing by Author "McGowan, Julie J"

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    Development of a Taxonomy for Health Information Technology
    (2007) Dixon, Brian E.; Zafar, Atif; McGowan, Julie J
    Taxonomies provide schemas to help classify entities and define the relationships between them. Early computing enabled the development of ontologies and Medical Subject Headings (MeSH), the first modern classification of medical terminology as applied to medical literature. Later developments, such as MEDLINE, expanded MeSH to include a number of medical informatics terms. However, a lack of specificity in MeSH and other existing informatics taxonomies for terminology used to describe the growing field of health information technology (health IT) created the need for the development of a specialized taxonomy. Experts associated with the Agency for Healthcare Research and Qualitys (AHRQs) National Resource Center for Health Information Technology (NRC) created and evaluated a taxonomy for health IT, to enable users of a public health IT Web site to efficiently identify resources within an online, searchable repository.
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    Electronic Laboratory Data Quality and the Value of a Health Information Exchange to Support Public Health Reporting Processes
    (2011-10) Dixon, Brian E.; McGowan, Julie J; Grannis, Shaun J
    There is increasing interest in leveraging electronic health data across disparate sources for a variety of uses. A fallacy often held by data consumers is that clinical data quality is homogeneous across sources. We examined one attribute of data quality, completeness, in the context of electronic laboratory reporting of notifiable disease information. We evaluated 7.5 million laboratory reports from clinical information systems for their completeness with respect to data needed for public health reporting processes. We also examined the impact of health information exchange (HIE) enhancement methods that attempt to improve completeness. The laboratory data were heterogeneous in their completeness. Fields identifying the patient and test results were usually complete. Fields containing patient demographics, patient contact information, and provider contact information were suboptimal. Data processed by the HIE were often more complete, suggesting that HIEs can support improvements to existing public health reporting processes.
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    Enhancing a Taxonomy for Health Information Technology: An Exploratory Study of User Input Towards Folksonomy
    (2010) Dixon, Brian E.; McGowan, Julie J
    The U.S. Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality has created a public website to disseminate critical information regarding its health information technology initiative. The website is maintained by AHRQ's Natiomal Resource Center (NRC) for Health Information Technology. In the latest continuous quality improvement project, the NRC used the site's search logs to extract user-generated search phrases. The phrases were then compared to the site's controlled vocabulary with respect to language, grammar, and search precision. Results of the comparison demonstrate that search log data can be a cost-effective way to improve controlled vocabularies as well as information retrieval. User-entered search phrases were found to also share many similarities with folksonomy tags.