JMIR Medical Informatics

In response to the intricate language, specialized terminology outside everyday life, and the frequent presence of abbreviations and acronyms inherent in health care text data, domain adaptation techniques have emerged as crucial to transformer-based models. This refinement in the knowledge of the language models (LMs) allows for a better understanding of the medical textual data, which results in an improvement in medical downstream tasks, such as information extraction (IE). We have identified a gap in the literature regarding health care LMs. Therefore, this study presents a scoping literature review investigating domain adaptation methods for transformers in health care, differentiating between English and non-English languages, focusing on Portuguese. Most specifically, we investigated the development of health care LMs, with the aim of comparing Portuguese with other more developed languages to guide the path of a non–English-language with fewer resources.

Reaching meaningful interoperability between proprietary healthcare systems is a ubiquitous task in medical informatics, where communication servers are traditionally used for referring and transforming data from source to target systems. The Mirth Connect Server, an open-source communication server, offers in addition to the exchange functionality, functions for the simultaneous manipulation of data. The standard Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) is recently becoming more and more prevalent in national healthcare systems. FHIR specifies its own standardized mechanisms for transforming data structures using StructureMaps and the FHIR Mapping Language (FML).

Obtaining and describing the semiology efficiently and classifying seizures types correctly are crucial for the diagnosis and treatment of epilepsy. Nevertheless, there exists an inadequacy in related informatics resources and decision-support tools.

Computerized clinical decision support systems (CDSSs) enhance patient care through real-time, evidence-based guidance for health care professionals. Despite this, the effective implementation of these systems for health services presents multifaceted challenges, leading to inappropriate use and abandonment over the course of time. Using the Non-Adoption, Abandonment, Scale-Up, Spread, and Sustainability (NASSS) framework, this qualitative study examined CDSS adoption in a metropolitan health service, identifying determinants across implementation stages to optimize CDSS integration into health care practice.

Named entity recognition (NER) models are essential for extracting structured information from unstructured medical texts by identifying entities such as diseases, treatments, and conditions, enhancing clinical decision-making and research. Innovations in machine learning, particularly those involving Bidirectional Encoder Representations From Transformers (BERT)–based deep learning and large language models, have significantly advanced NER capabilities. However, their performance varies across medical datasets due to the complexity and diversity of medical terminology. Previous studies have often focused on overall performance, neglecting specific challenges in medical contexts and the impact of macrofactors like lexical composition on prediction accuracy. These gaps hinder the development of optimized NER models for medical applications.

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.

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.