Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association Editorial

National centers for biomedical computing: from the BISTI report to the future

Berg, J. M. — 2012-02-07T16:14:26-08:00

I had the privilege of becoming the Director of the National Institute of General Medical Sciences, one of the lead Institutes at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) for the National Centers for Biomedical Computing program, at the launch of the NIH Roadmap for Medical Research. This gave me a unique perspective from which to observe this program. The perspectives described herein are my own.

The emergence of the field of biomedical computing captured the attention of the leadership of the NIH toward the end of the 1990s. NIH Director Harold Varmus named a working group of the Advisory Committee to the Director1 "to investigate the needs of NIH-supported investigators for computing resources, including hardware, software, networking, algorithms, and training." This project was termed the Biomedical Information Science and Technology Initiative (BISTI). The BISTI working group made four principal recommendations.2 Their self-described centerpiece of these...

Computerized provider-order entry: challenges, achievements, and opportunities

Johnson, K. — 2011-10-18T14:19:34-07:00

The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines ‘traction’ as the adhesive friction of a body on a surface on which it moves.1 Within the field of biomedical informatics, we have updated that definition so that the ‘body’ may refer to a technological advance, and the ‘surface’ to a person, group, or environment in which the technological advance has been introduced. In this context, traction implies not just adoption, but adherence, or the ‘state of steady or faithful attachment’.

By any measure, the past 5 years has witnessed the attainment of traction by computerized provider order entry (CPOE). Certainly, the work undertaken by the Institute of Medicine to position CPOE as the most critical component of a safe decision-making environment,2–5 leading to the eventual mandates for CPOE as a part of certified health information technology,6 justifies this assertion. The early efforts of...

Overcoming barriers to NLP for clinical text: the role of shared tasks and the need for additional creative solutions

2011-08-16T13:07:36-07:00

This issue of JAMIA focuses on natural language processing (NLP) techniques for clinical-text information extraction. Several articles are offshoots of the yearly ‘Informatics for Integrating Biology and the Bedside’ (i2b2) (http://www.i2b2.org) NLP shared-task challenge, introduced by Uzuner et al (see page 552)1 and co-sponsored by the Veteran's Administration for the last 2 years. This shared task follows long-running challenge evaluations in other fields, such as the Message Understanding Conference (MUC) for information extraction,2 TREC3 for text information retrieval, and CASP4 for protein structure prediction. Shared tasks in the clinical domain are recent and include annual i2b2 Challenges that began in 2006, a challenge for multi-label classification of radiology reports sponsored by Cincinnati Children's Hospital in 2007,5 a 2011 Cincinnati Children's Hospital challenge on suicide notes,6 and the 2011 TREC information retrieval shared task involving...