Vital Signs

Robotics is the branch of engineering concerned with the conception, design, manufacture, and operation of robots, a field that draws on electronics, computing, AI, and bioengineering, among others. This post explains the HIMSS Dictionary definition, then reviews six sources: a randomized trial of robotic and laparoscopic rectal cancer surgery, a robotic syringe-filling implementation in a hospital pharmacy, a review of minimum caseloads for cost-effective robotic surgery, a scoping review of embodied intelligence, interviews with intensive care clinicians, and a survey of Japanese home-visit nurses.

Nonrepudiation refers to cryptographic receipts created so that the author of a message cannot falsely deny sending it, and to proof for a third party that only the signer could have created a signature. This post explains the HIMSS Dictionary definition, then reviews six sources: the NIST Digital Signature Standard, a notary archive model for signed patient documents, a public key infrastructure for e-referral and e-prescription, a blockchain-based medical record exchange design, a post-quantum authentication protocol for connected medical devices, and the FDA rule on electronic signatures.

FISMA is U.S. legislation that sets a comprehensive framework for protecting government information, operations, and assets against natural and man-made threats, signed in 2002 as part of the Electronic Government Act. This post explains the HIMSS Dictionary definition and the 2014 update, the Federal Information Security Modernization Act, then reviews five primary sources: the 2014 law, the NIST FISMA page, FIPS 200, NIST SP 800-53 Revision 5, and NIST SP 800-37 Revision 2.

ERP, or enterprise resource planning, refers to management information systems that integrate and automate many business functions of an enterprise, such as the payroll, human resources, purchasing, inventory and supplies, budgets, and the general ledger. This post explains the HIMSS Dictionary definition, then reviews five sources: a study of ERP in rural health care, the Scan4Safety supply chain program in NHS England, pharmacy inventory accuracy across multiple systems, an internal audit information system for hospital consumables, and lessons from a nurse workforce decision-support system that struggled to integrate HR and scheduling data.

A critical pathway is a tool that supports collaborative, coordinated practice by providing for multidisciplinary communication, care planning, and documentation of caregivers’ evaluations and assessments. This post explains the HIMSS Dictionary definition, then reviews five sources: a 2025 Cochrane review of clinical pathways in 58 studies, a review of barriers to care pathways in primary care, a systematic review of integrated care pathways, an evaluation of 41 nurse-initiated care protocols in an emergency department, and a meta-analysis of two chest pain pathways in 110,933 patient presentations.

Acceptable risk is the level of risk at which, after weighing the costs and benefits of reducing it, no action is judged to be warranted at a given time. This post explains the HIMSS Dictionary definition, then reviews six sources: NIST’s guidance on managing and assessing information security risk, the HIPAA requirements for risk management and for reasonable and appropriate safeguards, a framework that keeps patient safety and cybersecurity risk models separate, and a comparison of cybersecurity regulation for AI-enabled medical device software in Korea, the United States, and the European Union.

Variance analysis is the process of computing the differences between actual and budgeted or targeted levels of performance and identifying their causes. This post explains the HIMSS Dictionary definition, then reviews five sources: a study of whether surgeons or hospitals drive cost variance in lumbar fusion, an analysis of how inflation affects Dutch hospital margins, an operational dashboard from a proton therapy center, a costing model that expresses time uncertainty as intervals, and a project-control method that predicts cost and schedule variance.

A security control assessment tests or evaluates an information system’s management, operational, and technical security controls to find out whether they are in place, working as intended, and meeting security requirements. This post explains the HIMSS Dictionary definition, then reviews six sources: NIST SP 800-53A, the NIST Risk Management Framework in SP 800-37, NIST SP 800-115 on technical testing, the HIPAA risk analysis and evaluation requirements, an analysis of 5,752 healthcare cyber incidents, and a cyber risk assessment approach for connected medical devices.

REST, or representational state transfer, is an architectural style for distributed systems such as the World Wide Web, and it has become a leading design model for web services, including those used in health IT. This post explains the HIMSS Dictionary definition and the constraints behind the style, then reviews four sources: Roy Fielding’s dissertation that defined REST, the HL7 FHIR RESTful API, a benchmark comparing REST queries to big data engines on 71 million FHIR resources, and a RESTful API for PROMIS measures at three medical centers.

NoSQL describes an approach to databases that moves away from the tables, columns, rows, and schemas of traditional relational systems and uses more flexible data models. This post explains the HIMSS Dictionary definition, then reviews five sources: a comparative review of databases for standardized EHR data, a query interpreter that translates archetype queries into MongoDB, an openEHR benchmark dataset of more than 150 million records, a big data platform built on HBase, and a clinical data warehouse where NoSQL outperformed relational SQL by 40 to 69 percent on complex queries.

Intrusion detection is the act of detecting actions that threaten the confidentiality, integrity, or availability of a protected resource. This post explains the HIMSS Dictionary definition and the NIST classes of IDPS, then reviews five sources: NIST SP 800-94, a critical survey of AI-based intrusion detection for the Internet of Medical Things, a review of 24 primary studies on trustworthy detection, a deep learning model for MQTT attacks, and a governance-aware response framework tested in simulation.

eHealth is a broadly defined term for health care practice supported by information and communication technologies, covering records, remote care, and evidence-based practice. This post explains the HIMSS Dictionary definition, then reviews five sources: the WHO digital health strategy, a scoping review of how virtual care is measured, an umbrella review of telemedicine implementation across 973 primary studies, a meta-analysis of eHealth literacy in 12,390 nursing students, and a pilot of a digital self-management app for people on hemodialysis.

CQL, or Clinical Quality Language, is an HL7 authoring language meant to be readable by people while structured enough for computers to process, and it supports efforts to align eCQM and decision support standards. This post explains the HIMSS Dictionary definition and the HL7 specification, then reviews four studies: 39 CQL libraries built from Taiwan’s national quality indicators, a combined large language model and CQL approach to myocarditis surveillance, an LLM-in-the-loop CQL engine, and an open source FHIR server with an embedded CQL engine.

AAA stands for authentication, authorization, and accounting, a security principle that checks who a user is, decides what the user may do, and records what the user did. This post explains the HIMSS Dictionary definition and how it maps to the HIPAA Security Rule, then reviews six sources: RFC 2903 on the generic AAA architecture, RFC 6733 on the Diameter protocol, the HIPAA technical safeguards, a systematic review of EHR security and privacy, a study of single sign-on in 55 hospitals, and a single sign-on study on a triage unit.

Voice ID, or voice authentication, is a type of user authentication that relies on voice print biometrics, built on the idea that vocal characteristics are unique to each person. This post explains the HIMSS Dictionary definition, then reviews five sources: NIST’s 2025 digital identity guidance, which says biometric comparison based on voice shall not be used, a survey of 170 people on passwordless authentication methods, a survey of audio deepfake detection, a forensic study of cloned voices, and a study that used speech pause patterns to detect cloned audio.

Symmetric-key cryptography protects data with one shared key that both parties use to encrypt and decrypt. It is simpler and faster than public-key methods, but the key has to be exchanged securely. This post explains the HIMSS Dictionary definition, then reviews five sources: NIST’s AES standard, NIST guidance on storage encryption, the HIPAA Security Rule’s encryption provisions, a patient-centric EHR system that combines AES with elliptic curve cryptography, and a lightweight cipher proposed for wireless body area networks.

Quantum computing is an area of research and development that uses the properties of quantum mechanics to perform some calculations faster than classical computers that rely on Boolean logic. This post explains the HIMSS Dictionary definition, then reviews five sources: NIST’s first post-quantum key establishment standard, NIST’s post-quantum digital signature standard, a review of post-quantum cryptography for healthcare, a review of quantum machine learning in diabetes, and a simulated hybrid quantum-classical model for ICU mortality prediction.

A mobile app is software written for handheld wireless devices, mainly smartphones and tablets, and not for desktop or laptop computers. This post explains the HIMSS Dictionary definition and the web-based, native, and hybrid categories, then reviews five sources: NIST guidance on mobile device security, a randomized trial of app-based symptom triage in early breast cancer, and three app store evaluations covering infertility, kidney transplant, and atrial fibrillation self-management.

Integration testing is a testing event that looks for errors in the interactions and interfaces among software components when they are combined into larger parts of a system. This post explains the HIMSS Dictionary definition and where integration testing sits among unit, system, and acceptance testing, then reviews five sources: FDA software validation guidance, the HL7 FHIR testing framework, a survey of conformance testing in Finland, a DICOM connectathon with 32 implementers, and the IHE connectathon model for digital pathology.

An electronic signature, or e-signature, is an electronic indication that a person intends to agree to a document or set of data, and it often carries the same legal commitment as a handwritten signature. This post explains the HIMSS Dictionary definition and the difference from a digital signature, then reviews five sources: the FDA’s electronic records rule in 21 CFR Part 11, a study of electronic and paper surgical consent, a randomized trial of a multimedia consent tool, a review of e-consent for research, and a review of digital consent in low-resource settings.