Vital Signs

A pharmacy information system, or PIS, gives pharmacy staff the application environment they need to practice, often covering ordering, procurement, preparation, dispensing, and monitoring of the medication use process. This post explains the HIMSS Dictionary definition and how HL7 FHIR describes dispensing, then reviews five studies: a Saudi medical center case study, a three-hospital assessment of PIS functions in use, a survey on drug confusion alerts, an analysis of e-prescription mismatches in 14 community pharmacies, and an inventory interface project.

A chronic disease is a long-lasting or recurring illness, such as diabetes, asthma, heart disease, kidney disease, or chronic lung disease. This post explains the HIMSS Dictionary definition and reviews five sources: a systematic review of virtual nurse interventions, a meta-analysis of digital tools for medication adherence across 52 studies, a commentary on digital self-care and AI, a trial of documentation-based decision support for coronary artery disease and diabetes, and a SMART on FHIR application for COPD management.

An appointment is a reserved block of time, or several blocks, on a schedule, tied to one or more services or resources, such as a clinic visit or a reserved piece of equipment. This post explains the HIMSS Dictionary definition and how the HL7 FHIR Appointment resource models it, then reviews five sources: a trial of risk-driven reminder calls, a systematic review of no-show prediction, a randomized trial of reminder timing, a study of online scheduling, and a survey of scheduling system use in primary care.

User experience, or UX, covers a person’s perceptions, emotions, and actions before, during, and after using a product or system. This post explains the HIMSS Dictionary definition and how UX differs from usability, then reviews five sources: an integrative review of nurses’ EHR experience across six dimensions, five screen design principles tested with medical staff, interviews about an AI sepsis alert, a randomized crossover trial with 36 ICU nurses, and a pilot of ambient AI scribes in urology.

A clinical informaticist is a clinician who uses knowledge of patient care together with informatics methods and tools to analyze, design, implement, and evaluate information and communication systems that improve health outcomes and care. This post explains the role as the HIMSS Dictionary describes it and reviews four studies: the workforce of 2,018 certified clinical informatics physicians, a practice analysis with 5 domains and 42 tasks, a UK competency framework with 111 competency statements, and a 2026 effort to refine the definition.

Documentation integrity is the accuracy of the complete health record, including governance, patient identification, authorship, amendments, corrections, and audits of documentation used for claims. This post explains the term, what the HIPAA rules say about amendments and integrity controls, what a qualitative survey found about physician experience with documentation queries, and how new research frames record integrity for AI-assisted documentation.

Ambulatory care is clinical care provided on an outpatient basis to people who are able to walk about, covering diagnosis, observation, treatment, and rehabilitation. This post explains how ambulatory settings differ for health IT, what a systematic review found about lists of ambulatory care sensitive conditions in Europe, and what a quality improvement study of 263 clinicians found about ambient AI scribes and burnout.

An alert is a signal, written or acoustic, that announces a message or result or warns of a possible problem. The HIMSS Dictionary separates passive alerts, which appear on screen, from active alerts that notify a person immediately. This post covers what a 23-article review found about override rates, what a 39-article review found about design and role tailoring, and what a four-trust NHS study found about digital sepsis alerts.

The HIMSS Dictionary describes the science of clinical informatics as the transformation of clinical data into information, then knowledge, that supports clinical decision-making. This post explains that progression, what a study of 93 nursing handoffs found about knowledge in everyday communication, how certification and fellowship pathways developed, and why the field depends on understanding how clinicians actually decide.

APACHE, the Acute Physiology and Chronic Health Evaluation, is a family of severity-of-illness scores that combine early ICU physiology, age, and chronic health status to estimate the risk of hospital death. This post explains how APACHE II and IV work, what a 145-patient trauma study and a 159-admission COPD study found about their accuracy, what a systematic review found in low- and middle-income countries, and why calibration matters as much as discrimination.

In education, a simulation resembles a real-life situation a learner might meet so that decisions can be practiced safely. In health informatics, simulation is also used to test new systems before go-live. This post explains both uses, what a pediatric hospital found when in situ simulations and usability testing produced 475 recommendations before an EHR transition, what a review of 52 nursing simulation studies found about self-efficacy, and what studies of EHR training reported.

Nutrition informatics is the effective retrieval, organization, storage, and use of information, data, and knowledge to solve food and nutrition problems and support decisions. This post explains the Nutrition Care Process and its standardized terminology, what a Swiss audit of 92 records found about documentation quality, what a mixed methods study of 4,426 dietitians found about barriers and enablers, and how an automated malnutrition screening model performed using two data points.

Workflow management is an approach that defines and controls business processes spanning multiple applications, and it covers automating the tasks within them. This post explains how it differs from workflow design, what a process mining study of 43,183 events in radiotherapy found about suspension delays, what a scoping review of 16 studies found about referral documentation tools, how robotic process automation cut cancer registry abstraction time, and what a scoping review of 28 studies says about usability and workflow.

A knowledge base is a set of data tables, databases, and other tools that assist the process of care. This post explains how clinical knowledge bases feed decision support, what a comparison of three commercial drug interaction knowledge bases found, what a 2006 review concluded about errors in commercial prescribing systems, and what a primary care study showed when a decision support tool was ignored in 75 percent of encounters.

In drug safety, an adverse event (AE) is any untoward medical occurrence associated with the use of a drug or medical product, whether or not the product is thought to have caused it. This post explains the FDA definitions in 21 CFR 312.32, the 15-day and 7-day reporting rules, and how a text-mining study of 2.75 million Dutch health records and a Canadian NLP study found adverse drug events that spontaneous reporting misses.

A medical error is a planned action that fails to be completed as intended or the use of a wrong plan, and it is also used for mistakes that harm patients. This post explains what the WHO and a 5,000-chart Korean review found about harm and preventability, what a review says about barcode medication administration, and how errors affect the nurses involved.

Usability testing evaluates a product by watching representative users attempt typical tasks to find problems and measure satisfaction. This post explains the methods reported in a review of electronic discharge summary studies, what a site-specific testing program of 13 EHR features found, and what a scenario-based test with 12 nurses revealed about documentation screens.

A transition of care is a patient’s movement from one care setting to another, such as hospital to home or primary care to a specialist. This post explains what a meta-analysis of 16 trials of nurse-led transitional care, a network meta-analysis of 19 heart failure trials, and two stroke reviews found, and why discharge information and follow-up determine the result.

Patient-centric describes care and technology organized around the patient’s needs, preferences, and family, with open and sustained engagement. This post explains what a heuristic evaluation of two major patient portals found, what a safety-net clinic survey of 204 patients showed about digital literacy, and how one hospital co-designed a five-question tool with patients.

Health informatics is a field that studies how information technology is built, adopted, and used to improve the delivery, management, and planning of health care. This post explains how it relates to clinical and public health informatics, what the 2026 revision of the TIGER competency framework says nurses need, how one graduate medical education curriculum builds the workforce, and why digital health equity belongs in the field.