Browsing by Author "Zafar, Atif"

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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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    Pulling Back the Covers: Technical Lessons of a Real-World Health Information Exchange
    (2007) Zafar, Atif; Dixon, Brian E.
    Several nations and local communities are striving to achieve widespread, secure exchange of clinical data between various health care providers and public health organizations. Most of the literature on health information exchange focuses on the financial, political, and privacy aspects of these initiatives. Perhaps just as important are the technical and organizational factors that have influenced development of data exchange methods and results. One mature network in the Midwestern United States has had success in establishing consistent, secure exchange of clinical data for more than ten years. Presented here are the technical lessons learned and design decisions made from this initiative with the hope that they can be used by others striving to connect disparate clinical information systems for the improvement of health care quality and safety.
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    The selection of high-impact health informatics literature: a comparison of results between the content expert and the expert searcher
    (http://www-ncbi-nlm-nih-gov.proxy.medlib.iupui.edu/pmc/articles/PMC2706443/, 2009-07) Whipple, Elizabeth C.; McGowan, Julie J.; Dixon, Brian E.; Zafar, Atif
    BACKGROUND: The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) National Resource Center for Health Information Technology (NRC) created the Health IT Bibliography that contains peer-reviewed articles in eleven different health informatics categories. To create the bibliography, informatics experts identified what they considered the seminal articles in each category. METHODS:Using the same eleven categories, an expert searcher (librarian) compiled a list of the "best" health informatics articles using information seeking and retrieval tools. The two sets of articles were then compared using high citation counts as a measure of value. RESULTS: The expert searcher set (8,230) contained more than 3 times the citations to chosen articles compared to the content expert set (2,382). Of 60 articles, 27% of those articles (n = 16) were included in both sets. The frequently cited journals were similar for both sets, and one-third of the same authors were cited in both sets. DISCUSSION: While citation counts and the timeliness of the articles differed in the two sets, the same authors and same journals were frequently present in both sets. CONCLUSION: A best practice for locating high-quality articles may be collaboration between expert searchers and content experts.