Vital Signs

Connected health is the use of technology to link the parts of the health system, including people, tools, and facilities, so that ongoing virtual care can be delivered across a patient population as needed. This post explains the HIMSS Dictionary definition and reviews five sources: a review of virtual care in heart failure, a cohort study of remote glucose monitoring in 1,436 adults, a scoping review of smart home health technology, a review of FHIR-based clinical applications, and a study protocol on the cybersecurity of remote monitoring systems.

An ambulatory care information system is an information system used to improve the quality of care and to bring business systems together in the ambulatory care setting. This post explains the HIMSS Dictionary definition and the range of tools it can cover beyond the chart, then reviews five sources: a comparison of EHR use across 371 health systems, a study of scheduled hours for 186,188 ambulatory physicians, a cohort study of appointment lengths, a usability study of a tablet-based cognitive test in primary care, and a randomized trial of AI chart summaries.

A wiki is server software that lets users create and edit web page content freely from any web browser. This post explains the HIMSS Dictionary definition and reviews five sources: a systematic review of 25 medical wikis, a perspective on wiki-style clinical documentation, a three-year experience with a residency wiki, a wiki used as a radiology IT knowledge base, and a review of wikis in medical education.

A system of record is the authoritative data source for a given data element or piece of information. This post explains the HIMSS Dictionary definition and reviews four sources: the HL7 FHIR Provenance resource, a viewpoint on where genomic findings should live in the EHR, a pipeline that handled mixed-format data for a registry study of 94 participants, and a case study of Lithuania’s centralized national digital health platform.

The Quality Data Model, or QDM, is an information model that defines the concepts used in quality of care, with the aim of letting EHR data be used automatically. This post explains the HIMSS Dictionary definition and reviews five sources: the eCQI Resource Center page on QDM versions, a method for converting textual diagnostic criteria into QDM, an approach to running QDM algorithms on the i2b2 platform, a prototype that executed a QDM-based measure at two universities, and a study that ran nine eCQMs for more than a million patients.

Metadata is structured information that describes other data to make it easier to retrieve, use, or manage. The HIMSS Dictionary names three main types: descriptive, structural, and administrative. This post explains the definition and each type, then reviews five sources: a study of standards and tools for secondary use of health data under FAIR principles, a CT series labeling system built because DICOM metadata are often incomplete, a DICOM framework that checks metadata against image content, an LLM workflow for metadata annotation, and a curation framework for brain tumor MRI data.

Integrated care is the systematic coordination of general and behavioral health care, bringing mental health, substance use, and primary care services together for people with multiple needs. This post explains the HIMSS Dictionary definition and what integration requires from health IT, then reviews four sources: a systematic review of 21 real-world collaborative care programs, a narrative review of collaborative care for depression in chronic illness, a cluster randomized trial across 22 primary care practices that used EHR decision support, and a clinician study of mHealth in integrated primary care.

A distributed ledger is a database that each participant, or node, in a large network holds and updates independently, with no central authority sending records to the others. It is also called distributed ledger technology, or DLT. This post explains the HIMSS Dictionary definition, then reviews five sources: a scoping review of 892 blockchain and DLT studies in health care, a systematic review of blockchain in EHRs, a proof of concept for patient opt-out management, a review of smart contracts in clinical trials, and a scoping review of self-sovereign identity.

Computer-assisted coding is software that uses natural language processing to analyze whole medical charts and pre-assign procedure and diagnosis codes for a coder to review. This post explains the HIMSS Dictionary definition and the HIPAA code sets involved, then reviews five sources: a crossover randomized trial in Norway and Sweden, a study of evaluation metrics for ICD coding systems, a systematic review of 54 automated ICD coding studies, an audit that found errors in widely used benchmark datasets, and a pilot of a GPT-4 based coding assistant.

An ambulatory medical record is the chart, kept on paper or electronically, for care delivered in outpatient or ambulatory settings. This post explains the HIMSS Dictionary definition and how outpatient records differ from inpatient charts, then reviews four sources: an EHR optimization intervention for ambulatory providers with 60 participants, a six-month evaluation of ambient AI documentation among 97 clinicians, a residency clinic intervention that raised test result communication from 57 to 76 percent, and a national survey of 1,875 office-based physicians on telemedicine tools.

A computer virus is malicious software that is embedded in an existing program, copies itself into other programs when the host runs, and cannot run on its own. This post explains the HIMSS Dictionary definition and how NIST SP 800-83 separates viruses from worms and Trojan horses, then reviews four sources: a 1992 investigation of a computer virus outbreak in a hospital pharmacy handled with infection control methods, the HIPAA requirement for protection from malicious software, a systematic review of human factors in healthcare cybersecurity, and a review of cybersecurity do’s and don’ts.

Social media monitoring is the use of social media channels to track, gather, and mine information about individuals or groups, usually organizations, to assess their reputation and how they are perceived online. It is also called social media listening. This post explains the HIMSS Dictionary definition, then reviews five sources: a scoping review of 60 studies on social media for drug safety, 91 South African social listening reports on COVID-19 misinformation, a study of questions about vulvar cancer, an analysis of 23,580 posts on diabetes drugs, and a scoping review of digital strategies against vaccine misinformation.

A qualified clinical data registry, or QCDR, is an entity that gathers clinical data from MIPS clinicians, individually or in groups, and reports it to CMS for them. Unlike a qualified registry, it is not limited to measures in the Quality Payment Program. This post explains the HIMSS Dictionary definition, then reviews four sources: an interrupted time series of 85 rheumatology practices that joined a QCDR, a study of dashboard engagement across 211 practices, a review of quality measure availability by specialty, and an analysis of topped-out MIPS measures.

Mobile device management is software that deploys, secures, monitors, integrates, and manages mobile devices such as smartphones, laptops, and tablets in the workplace. This post explains the HIMSS Dictionary definition and NIST SP 800-124 Revision 2, then reviews five sources: a survey of 204 US health care organizations on clinical mobile device use, a BYOD security maturity model piloted at an Australian hospital, a study of BYOD adoption factors among 620 healthcare workers in Iran, a review of UK and Irish guidance on personal devices and messaging apps, and a survey of clinician perceptions.

An implementation guide is a document that explains how to use a standard correctly for a specific purpose; the HIMSS Dictionary also lists a second meaning for installation and maintenance methods for software and hardware. This post explains both meanings and how HL7 FHIR defines an implementation guide, then reviews four sources: a scoping review of how FHIR implementation guides are created, a prenatal monitoring model built on an implementation guide, a Japanese survey that mapped CT and MRI safety items to FHIR and JP Core, and a roadmap that builds on the International Patient Summary guide.

A digital signature is a mathematical technique for confirming that a message, a piece of software, or a digital document is genuine and unaltered. This post explains the HIMSS Dictionary definition and how public and private keys work, then reviews six sources: NIST FIPS 186-5 and FIPS 204 on signature algorithms, the DEA rule that requires digital signatures for electronic controlled substance prescriptions, the HL7 FHIR Provenance resource, and two 2026 studies on post-quantum signatures for healthcare ledgers and Internet of Things devices.

A clinical protocol is a standard set of rules for how care is delivered in particular situations. This post explains the HIMSS Dictionary definition and how protocols differ from algorithms and guidelines, then reviews six sources: a pre-post study of a nurse-driven diabetic ketoacidosis insulin protocol in 250 patients, a qualitative study of nurse-driven CAUTI prevention in Saudi ICUs, a scoping review of protocol adherence barriers in emergency departments, a review of digital tools with standardized protocols, language models that turn protocol flowcharts into code, and an EHR application for a tolvaptan clinic.

Application integration, sometimes called enterprise application integration or EAI, is the process of bringing data or a function from one application program together with that of another, often through middleware. This post explains the HIMSS Dictionary definition, then reviews four sources: a FHIR-based inpatient rounding list integrated into a commercial EHR, a drug interaction app that used a full stack of HL7 standards, a vendor-neutral middleware framework for Ontario primary care, and an open-source integration engine for federated semantic interoperability.

Ubiquitous computing is the trend toward embedding microprocessors in everyday objects so they can communicate information, producing devices that are connected and always available. This post explains the HIMSS Dictionary definition, then reviews five sources: a scoping review of context-aware medical systems, a scoping review of 169 smart home health care studies, an ambient data platform for surgical safety, a qualitative study of smart bedside stations, and a pilot of passive sensing for mental health symptoms.

SMS, or Short Message Service, is the text messaging service of mobile networks, originally defined in the GSM standard for short messages that are stored and forwarded when a phone is not active. This post explains the HIMSS Dictionary definition, then reviews five sources: NIST guidance that restricts SMS for authentication, a meta-analysis of 13 studies of text reminders for pediatric appointments, a randomized trial of 59,994 high-risk patients who received added automated calls, a study of SMS responses and cancer screening, and a survey on secure text messaging among hospitalists.