Vital Signs

Biomedical informatics is the interdisciplinary field that studies how to use biomedical data, information, and knowledge to support science, problem solving, and decisions that improve health. This post explains the HIMSS Dictionary entry, which matches the definition adopted by AMIA, then reviews five sources on how the field is defined, taught, and certified, along with a gap analysis of graduate curricula.

Ancillary care is the wide set of services around the main medical visit, which the HIMSS Dictionary groups into diagnostic, therapeutic, and custodial services. This post explains the entry and how the term is used differently elsewhere, then reviews five sources: order fulfillment at Kaiser Permanente, a review of pressure injury risk in ancillary units, a colocated services study, lessons from four CPOE rollouts, and a narrative paper on pediatric services.

USHIK, the United States Health Information Knowledgebase, was a public registry from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality that let users find and compare the data elements in health care standards. The HIMSS Dictionary notes it is archived. This post explains what a metadata registry is, what USHIK held, why AHRQ archived it, and where the content can be found now.

The TIGER Initiative is a nursing-rooted effort to bring informatics into education and practice across health professions. This post explains the HIMSS Dictionary entry, then uses HIMSS pages, a 2014 news report, and two peer-reviewed papers to trace its history from 2006, its international competency frameworks, and its current form as the HIMSS TIGER Global Community, which uses a newer name than the Dictionary does.

The Reference Information Model, or RIM, is the shared information model from which HL7 Version 3 standards draw their content. This post explains the HIMSS Dictionary entry and HL7’s own description, then reviews five sources: two 2006 papers that argue over whether the RIM is coherent, the 2001 paper that tied the Clinical Document Architecture to it, an early data warehouse mapping, and a 2022 Chinese metadata project that referenced it.

Joint Application Development, or JAD, is a method in which users and designers work together in structured workshops to settle what a system must do before it is built. This post explains the HIMSS Dictionary entry and the roles in a JAD session, then looks at how three health IT projects, a nursing information system, an epilepsy patient portal, and a research survey tool, used JAD sessions, and what the evidence does not show.

HealthKit is Apple’s framework for collecting and sharing health and fitness data on iPhone and Apple Watch, with the user’s permission. This post explains the HIMSS Dictionary entry and Apple’s published privacy rules, then reviews four studies: a primary care uptake count, a small qualitative study of glucose data in the EHR, a personal health record that few users connected, and a knee replacement study that found weak links between phone-recorded measures and patient surveys.

An eligible clinician is a practitioner who may take part in, or must take part in, a Medicare payment incentive or quality reporting program. This post explains the HIMSS Dictionary entry and the difference between an eligible clinician and a MIPS eligible clinician under federal regulations, then reviews three studies of MIPS participation, payment, and documentation burden.

The Continuity of Care Maturity Model (CCMM) is a HIMSS framework that rates how well patient care is coordinated across sites, providers, and care settings, using eight stages from 0 to 7. This post explains the HIMSS Dictionary entry and the stages, then reviews what four studies show, including a Taiwanese pilot that reported reaching Stage 7 and two studies of the sibling EMRAM model that reached different conclusions.

AHIMA is the professional association for people who manage health information, founded in 1928 and renamed several times as the field moved from records to data. This post explains the HIMSS Dictionary listing, then walks through AHIMA’s history, its eight current credentials, its Code of Ethics, and how it differs from HIMSS.

A URL, or uniform resource locator, is the address that tells software where a web resource is and how to reach it. This post explains the HIMSS Dictionary definition and the standard that defines it, then reviews five sources: three studies of links that stop working, a model for detecting malicious URLs, and a study of 511 hospitals’ patient portals that found 29.4 percent offered login pages only in English.

A thin client is a networked computer that stores few programs locally and depends heavily on network resources. This post explains the HIMSS Dictionary definition, then reviews six sources: a server sizing stress test for an electronic patient record, a 910-bed hospital’s virtual desktop launch, a framework for a secure analytics platform, two single sign-on evaluations that also counted thin client savings, and a virtual desktop rollout for clinical research.

The Perioperative Nursing Data Set (PNDS) is a standardized nursing vocabulary for care around surgery, covering the time before admission through discharge. This post explains the HIMSS Dictionary definition, then reviews six sources: EMR integration at one health system, a Korean translation tested with 142 nurses, a Finnish test with 250 patients, a third-edition revision, a 114-element health system domain, and a systematic review of nursing terminologies. The sources date from 2006 to 2014.

A management service organization (MSO) is an entity that handles the administrative, nonclinical work of running a medical practice, and it can be owned by investors, hospitals, physician groups, or health plans. This post explains the HIMSS Dictionary definition, then reviews five sources: dermatology, gastroenterology, and orthopedic overviews of private equity, a study of dental insurer concentration, and an analysis of physician affiliation and site of care costs.

An interface terminology is the vocabulary clinicians use while documenting, built so everyday wording can be stored as structured data. This post explains the HIMSS Dictionary definition, then reviews five sources: a decade of experience with a structured lexicon at Vanderbilt, a model for integrating three kinds of terminology, a test showing 24 to 27 percent agreement between two mapping routes, a laboratory alignment to LOINC, and a mapping of 467 nursing interventions to SNOMED CT.

Digital radiography uses a digital x-ray detector to acquire images automatically and send them to a computer for viewing, in fixed or mobile systems. This post explains the HIMSS Dictionary definition, then reviews five sources: a systematic review of acquisition parameters, an exposure index tracking program on four detectors, a phantom-based image quality study, a comparison of radiation dose in digital and computed radiography, and a reject analysis of 76,325 images in two departments.

Behavioral health covers mental health and substance use conditions, life crises, and stress-related physical symptoms, and behavioral healthcare covers their prevention, diagnosis, and treatment. This post explains the HIMSS Dictionary definition, then reviews five sources: a review of measurement-based care, a scoping review of digital tools in collaborative care, a review of remote collaborative care trials, a survey of 46 health centers on telehealth, and a virtual collaboration model in 18 pediatric practices.

An ad hoc query is a question put to a data source on demand, as opposed to a predefined, routine report. This post explains the HIMSS Dictionary definition, then reviews five studies: 609 researchers who ran 6,662 i2b2 queries, a survey of how users formulate EHR queries, a view-based design that cut storage by 59 percent, a test of cohort retrieval methods across 56 topics, and a Toronto self-service analytics rollout in which dashboard views rose from 90 to over 14,500 a month.

Regional extension centers were local support organizations funded through ONC under the HITECH Act to help providers move toward meaningful use of certified EHRs. This post explains the HIMSS Dictionary definition, then reviews five studies: a national evaluation of 62 centers, a rural practice analysis, a county-level study of 2,715 counties, a tally of 19,000 reported issues, and a study of sustaining meaningful use.

A touch screen is a display that doubles as an input device, so people operate the computer by touching it directly. This post explains the HIMSS Dictionary definition, then reviews five studies: 96 head and neck cancer patients who used a touch-screen questionnaire, 80 scleroderma patients testing a touchscreen app, 40 adults with brain injury comparing tablet and paper cognitive tests, a review of user interfaces in radiology, and a review of microbes on touchscreens and UV disinfection doses.