Vital Signs

Physical safeguards are the physical measures, policies, and procedures that protect an organization’s electronic information systems, buildings, and equipment from natural and environmental hazards and unauthorized intrusion. This post explains the HIMSS Dictionary definition and the four standards in 45 CFR 164.310, then reviews five sources: breach statistics from 2010 to 2018, a comparison of for-profit and non-profit breach types, a ranking of locations to secure first, and two surveys of hospital information security safeguards.

Long-term care covers a range of services that meet a person’s health or personal care needs over a short or long period, helping people live as independently and safely as possible. This post explains the HIMSS Dictionary definition and the settings where care is delivered, then reviews six sources: a Delphi-updated health IT maturity model for nursing homes, a scoping review of digital fall prediction, a study of EHRs and medication discrepancies at transfer, two studies of a telemedicine program in Singapore, and residents’ experiences of video consultations in rural Sweden.

Immunization information systems are confidential, population-based, computerized databases that record immunization doses given by participating providers to people living in a defined geographic area. This post explains the HIMSS Dictionary definition and how HL7 FHIR models immunizations, then reviews five sources: studies of EHR and IIS interoperability in Michigan and Minnesota, a probabilistic linkage method for duplicate temporary-name records, interjurisdictional data exchange among three states, and a decision support pilot for HPV vaccination in pharmacies.

A denial-of-service attack tries to prevent legitimate users from reaching a service by flooding it with traffic or using up a shared resource. This post explains the HIMSS Dictionary definition and the distinction between DoS and DDoS, then reviews five sources: IETF RFC 4732, NIST SP 800-189 on mitigating DoS and DDoS, a study of cyberattack trends against hospitals from 2017 to 2023, a security rating of 373 Taiwanese hospital patient portals, and datasets for DDoS detection in healthcare Internet of Things settings.

A clinical algorithm is a flowchart that a diagnostician or therapist can follow to decide how to manage a patient with a specific clinical problem. This post explains the HIMSS Dictionary definition and how algorithms become EHR logic, then reviews five sources: a CDC initiative that turned cancer screening guidelines into computable decision support, a large language model method for building executable models from NICE guidelines, a framework showing how laboratory bias spreads through algorithms, the removal of race from eGFR equations, and a proposed diabetic foot care pathway.

An attack vector is a path that an unauthorized person or group uses to reach a target such as a system or network. This post explains the HIMSS Dictionary definition and the HIPAA risk analysis requirement, then reviews five sources: two studies of why hospital staff click on phishing messages, a review of linear accelerator cybersecurity, a framework for ICU ransomware preparedness, and a review of ransomware effects on trauma centers.

Web analytics is the process of analyzing how visitors behave on a website, usually to attract and keep more of them. This post explains the HIMSS Dictionary definition and the common metrics, then reviews five sources: a 58-month study of a scoliosis education site with more than 2.3 million users, a digital health platform evaluated with web analytics and RE-AIM, a Canadian outbreak notice study, and two studies of tracking technologies on hospital websites that raise privacy concerns.

Stress testing is a type of performance testing that checks an application’s robustness, availability, and reliability under extreme conditions such as heavy loads, high concurrency, or limited computing resources. This post explains the HIMSS Dictionary definition and how it differs from other test types, then reviews four sources: FDA guidance on software validation, the HIPAA contingency plan testing requirement, a benchmark of FHIR analytics queries on up to 71 million resources, and a scalable clinical data warehouse designed for 19 million daily records.

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.

Log management is the process of generating, transmitting, storing, analyzing, and disposing of log data. This post explains the HIMSS Dictionary definition, the NIST SP 800-92 guidance, and the HIPAA requirements for audit controls and activity review, then reviews three studies that used EHR audit logs to model clinician workflow, find care team members, and measure AI scribe effects.

A hash function is a cryptographic algorithm that computes a fixed-length value from input data, in a way that is designed to prevent the original contents from being recovered from that value. This post explains the HIMSS Dictionary definition and the NIST view of one-way and collision-resistant functions, then reviews three studies of hashing for privacy-preserving record linkage: the OneFlorida network, three sickle cell disease registries, and a system that checks questionable entry of hashed identifiers.

A decision tree is a tree-shaped diagram or model that works from a starting decision through branches of possible actions to leaves that show outcomes, and in data analysis it splits a large dataset into groups with similar values to understand likely results. This post explains the HIMSS Dictionary definition and reviews five sources: a bleeding-risk tree for women with intracerebral hemorrhage, a prehospital tree built on the mSOFA score, a prognosis model for palliative radiotherapy, a conversational dementia screening tool, and a comparison of machine learning models for Cushing’s syndrome.

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.

A WLAN, or wireless local area network, is a local network that uses high-frequency radio waves in place of wires to link devices. This post explains the HIMSS Dictionary definition and reviews five sources: NIST guidance on securing WLANs, a hospital study of wireless portable radiography that cut image availability time by 70 percent, a wireless tracking system for nurses, a case of WLAN interference with wireless ECG monitoring, and a transmission scheme for wireless telemedicine.

Smoke testing is a short series of test cases run before more rigorous testing to confirm that an application’s main features work. It can be automated, manual, or both. This post explains the HIMSS Dictionary definition and where smoke tests fit among other kinds of testing, then reviews four sources: a smoke testing method for distributed analytics, automated acceptance testing of clinical decision support in an EHR, an automated validation tool for clinical study metadata, and the FDA’s guidance on software validation.

Optical character recognition, or OCR, is technology that scans printed or written text, analyzes the image, and converts the characters into codes a computer can use. This post explains the HIMSS Dictionary definition and reviews four sources: automated processing of scanned outside medical records, an AI OCR system that drafts bone density reports, a pipeline for handwritten prescriptions, and a benchmark of visual language models on clinical trial forms.

A legacy system is outdated hardware, software, or a programming language that remains in use even though upgraded versions exist, and it often cannot grow or interact with newer systems. This post explains the HIMSS Dictionary definition and reviews five sources: nurses’ cognitive workload when moving from a legacy system to a commercial EHR, alert override rates in a legacy versus commercial EHR, EHR data migration options, an Ethiopian case study on overcoming legacy barriers to interoperability, and an openEHR approach to reusing legacy systems.

Hadoop is an open-source software framework for storing data and running applications on clusters of commodity hardware, with large storage, processing power, and the ability to run many tasks at once. This post explains the HIMSS Dictionary definition and reviews five sources: a platform for patient classification built on the Hadoop ecosystem, a Hadoop and PySpark framework for genomic studies, a systematic review of big data analytics in healthcare, a test of clinical data on HDFS and HBase, and a 2026 look at the move from Hadoop to cloud and AI.

Data profiling is a technique for examining data to check qualities such as accuracy and completeness and to uncover errors in how a source is organized. It is also called data discovery. This post explains the HIMSS Dictionary definition and reviews four sources: a systematic review of EHR data quality assessment, a review of the clinical data quality life cycle, an OMOP mapping project for tuberculosis records in Cameroon, and a method for converting HL7 CDA documents to OMOP.