JMIR Medical Informatics

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.

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 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 this 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 (e.g., 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.

Electronic medical records (EMRs) contain large amounts of detailed clinical information. Using chart review to identify conditions within large quantities of EMRs can be time-consuming and inefficient. EMR-based phenotyping utilizing machine learning (ML) and natural language processing (NLP) algorithms is a continually developing area of study that holds potential for numerous mental health disorders.

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.

The increasing demand for personal health record (PHR) systems is driven by individuals’ desire to actively manage their healthcare. However, the limited functionality of current PHR systems has affected users’ willingness to adopt them, leading to lower-than-expected usage rates. The HL7 Personal Health Record System Functional Model (PHR-S FM) was proposed to address this issue, outlining all possible functionalities in PHR systems. Although the PHR-S FM provides a comprehensive theoretical framework, its practical effectiveness and applicability have not been fully explored.

Over 200 health information exchanges (HIEs) are currently operational in Japan. The feature for remote on-demand viewing, or searching for aggregated patient health data from multiple institutions is the most common. However, the usage of this feature by individual users and institutions remains unknown.

Large language models (LLMs) have substantially advanced natural language processing (NLP) capabilities but often struggle with knowledge-driven tasks in specialized domains such as biomedicine. Integrating biomedical knowledge sources such as SNOMED CT into LLMs may enhance their performance on biomedical tasks. However, the methodologies and effectiveness of incorporating SNOMED CT into LLMs have not been systematically reviewed.

Generative artificial intelligence (GAI) systems by Google have recently been updated from Bard to Gemini and Gemini Advanced as of December 2023. Gemini is a basic, free-to-use model after a user’s login, while Gemini Advanced operates on a more advanced model requiring a fee-based subscription. These systems have the potential to enhance medical diagnostics. However, the impact of these updates on comprehensive diagnostic accuracy remains unknown.

Electronic health records (EHRs) are increasingly used for epidemiologic research to advance public health practice. However, key variables are susceptible to missing data or misclassification within EHRs, including demographic information or disease status, which could affect estimation of disease prevalence or risk factor associations.

Electronic Medical Records (EMRs) store extensive patient data and serve as a comprehensive repository, including textual medical records like surgical and imaging reports. Their utility in Clinical Decision Support Systems (CDSS) is significant, but the widespread use of ambiguous and unstandardized abbreviations in clinical documents poses challenges for Natural Language Processing (NLP) in CDSS. Efficient abbreviation disambiguation methods are needed for effective information extraction.

Cardiovascular drug development requires synthesizing relevant literature about indications, mechanisms, biomarkers, and outcomes, with large language models (LLMs) capable of potentially addressing this need.

Data element repositories facilitate high-quality medical data sharing by standardizing data and enhancing semantic interoperability. However, the application of repositories is confined to specific projects and institutions.