Sunday, August 9, 2009

PubMed's Electronic Health Records Special Query

The August 7, 2009 National Library of Medicine Technical Bulletin caught my eye with the news of a new electronic health record (EHR) special query
... a PubMed search including subject terms and other keywords. Areas of coverage include implementation, attitudes, beliefs and use, data privacy, health data standards, and consumer access to the EHR and personal health records... [and] retrieves literature in many languages and from more than 27,000 PubMed citations, including research from many countries.
Cool! I took it for a 91 second test drive using Jing and I'm not too sure about the last part of the query. Take a look and feel free to use my internal audio of 'PEW-PEW-PEW-PEW!' as I minimize each of the fields in Advanced Search:



The snippet I cut was
AND (j ahima [ta]
OR j am med inform assoc [ta]
OR amia annu symp proc [ta]
OR health data manag [ta]
OR int j med inform [ta]
OR yearb med inform [ta]
OR telemed j e health [ta]
OR stud health technol inform [ta])


I'm not certain what the rationale is to construct such a comprehensive search then limit it to this handful of (admittedly great) sources. Are the 3,961 other articles about EHRs in different journals/sources less worthy? What do you think? I'll dig in to take a closer look later.

Do check out the EHR Information Resources below the query, there were links to other federal agencies and some associations & foundations I didn't know about.

3 comments:

Rachel said...

I haven't seen the whole thing or run the full search to see the results returned by removing the journal aspects, so take this guess with a grain of salt, but the only reason I could think of for doing that would be if you wanted to only really get the techy articles about the development of such systems, from the programmer/developer/tech only perspective. You'd probably still miss some relevant things in the journals, but I'm thinking the informatics ones are going to be more about creation, whereas the more clinical journals might be more about implementation, attitudes, response. Other than that possibility (which I'm just pondering, and not 100% on), I agree with you that I probably wouldn't limit that way (unless the user specifically asked for it).

Nikki Dettmar said...

I agree, Rachel, although I think we'll see more articles about EHRs in other fields (nursing, PAs, even JMLA etc.) and I don't want those perspectives excluded since usability is just as important as design & implementation from my perspective. I wish I had time to dig into the differences but wanted to call awareness to it.

Rachel said...

Yep, I think you're right - another reason why I don't like the canned/pre-limited searches. :)