The widespread adoption of electronic medical records makes it possible to more effectively learn from and improve clinical care. A significant challenge is the development and wide spread diffusion of tools that make it possible to aggregate, structure, and analyze medical record data.

The National Library of Medicine (NLM), a significant producer of such tools and a component of the National Institutes of Health, has partnered with the Department of Veterans Affairs Office of Research and Development and the American Medical Informatics Association’s Natural Language Processing Working Group to launch the Online Registry of Biomedical Informatics Tools Project.

This online catalog was designed to facilitate easier location of available software tools and related resources that can be used to turn medical data into valuable information. Examples of these resources include natural language processing software, knowledge bases, ontologies, and controlled vocabularies, machine learning and data mining software, and visualization tools.

Users of ORBIT can:

• Contribute information about resources;
• Add comments, questions, & ratings about resources;
• Follow resources of interest, receiving notification when any changes are made to resource pages;
• Search by any number of fields including institution, resource type, programming languages, etc.;
• Link to code repositories hosting resources, home institutions of resources, etc.; and
• Share discovered resources with others easily through email or any one of dozens of social networking sites.

To learn more, please visit the Online Registry of Biomedical Informatics Tools (ORBIT) website and the ORBIT About Us webpage.

MedlinePlus Connect now delivers targeted consumer health information in response to even more problem codes! MedlinePlus Connect coverage has expanded to include the descendants of the SNOMED CT CORE Problem List Subset. Previously, the focus was on the CORE Problem Subset codes only. This expanded coverage has doubled MedlinePlus Connect’s coverage of SNOMED CT codes. Coverage of ICD-9-CM continues to grow, and MedlinePlus Connect will support ICD-10-CM in the future.

MedlinePlus Connect is a free service of the National Library of Medicine (NLM), National Institutes of Health (NIH), and the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). This service allows health organizations and health IT providers to link patient portals and electronic health record (EHR) systems to MedlinePlus, an authoritative up-to-date health information resource for patients, families, and health care providers. MedlinePlus Connect accepts requests for information on diagnoses (problem codes), medications, and lab tests, and returns related MedlinePlus information.

Don’t hesitate to let the MedlinePlus Connect team or the PSRML know if you have any questions about MedlinePlus Connect. Also, please let MedlinePlus Connect team know if you’d like your company or organization to be added to the MedlinePlus Connect sample users list.

Today the National Library of Medicine (NLM) enhanced the MedlinePlus Connect Web service for problem/diagnosis codes by adding selected links to related information for patients to the XML response. Here’s an example of how these links appear for ICD-9-CM code 493.22 in the Web service response XML. The links appear beneath the topic summary, in bulleted list format. You can see responses for other problem/diagnosis codes by visiting the MedlinePlus Connect Web service demonstration page.

Prior to this release, MedlinePlus Connect returned these selected links via the Web application response but not in the Web service response. This change applies to both English and Spanish responses for ICD-9-CM and SNOMED CT requests.

Special Instructions for Current Users of the MedlinePlus Connect Web Service:

In the Web service response XML, the new links appear in the <summary> node within a new unordered list having the class “NLMrelatedLinks”. The impact on applications that utilize the MedlinePlus Connect Web service is that the block of text beneath the summary and summary attribution grows vertically to accommodate the new links in bulleted list format. Users that would like to display this new content do not need to modify their requests to the service in any way. The links are now available in the XML response.

The range of related links associated with health topics in the MedlinePlus Connect Web service response varies from zero to dozens, depending on the health topic. On average, health topics have four to five related links assigned to them. Users may choose to display all of the links or code their applications to only display a certain number of links. As an example, the MedlinePlus Connect Web application response page only displays a maximum of five related links and gives users the option to “see all” to view the entire list. You can see an example of this expandable/collapsible menu formatting on the Web application response page for ICD-9-CM code 493.22.

Users that prefer not to display this new content should consider suppressing the links in the new “NLMrelatedLinks” class through the use of style sheets.

This enhancement only affects the Web service response for problem/diagnosis codes (ICD-9-CM, SNOMED-CT). There are no changes to the Web application response and no changes to the Web service response for lab tests or medications.

If you have questions about this enhancement, please contact the MedlinePlus Connect team.

President Barack Obama has declared the week of September 11-16, 2011, National Health Information Technology Week.

National Health Information Technology Week is a time to highlight the importance of efficient information systems that protect the privacy and security of personal health information while improving the delivery of health care in the United States.

There is no better time for the health information technology (health IT) community to come together to raise national awareness regarding the consistent breakthroughs and hard work industry professionals, providers, and consumers put forward on a daily basis to ensure they are moving toward the common goal of advancing the future of health care through private and secure health IT.

Learn more about health IT by visiting HealthIT.gov.

Today the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) in conjunction with the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) will be hosting the first of-its-kind-Consumer Health IT Summit this morning at 10:00am PDT.

What Is the Summit About? The Secretary of HHS, Kathleen Sebelius, will be discussing new innovative and regulatory initiatives in support of consumer access to their health information. At the Summit, consumers, providers, and public and private sector leaders will join together to discuss best practices for empowering consumers to become active partners in their health care by accessing and using their health information. More than 30 organizations and patients who have experienced benefits from access to information through health IT will be in attendance at the Consumer Heath IT Summit to pledge their support for this important initiative that will help improve patient care and health outcomes.

How to Attend: There will be a live webcast of the Summit. Please join by visiting http://www.hhs.gov/live/

The Office of the National Coordinator (ONC) for Health Information Technology has launched its new website, HealthIT.gov. This website is designed to become the leading national resource on health information technology (health IT) for both consumers and health care professionals.

Health is personal. It’s personal for the parent who has a child with asthma. It’s personal for the patient with a new cancer diagnosis. And it’s personal for the doctor who is responsible for caring for them. At its core, HealthIT.gov is about patients, and it’s about helping them get the information they need, connecting them to resources that empower them to make changes, and ultimately, improving the nation’s health—one person at a time.

Whether you are a parent who is wondering how an electronic health record (EHR) will affect her family’s privacy or a provider who is overwhelmed by the idea of transitioning to EHRs, HealthIT.gov has the resources to help answer your questions.

The Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) is pleased to announce that a set of 20 curriculum components is now available to the public at no cost, including all institutions of higher education nationwide and internationally. Funded by the $10 million ONC Curriculum Development Centers Program, these teaching materials have been in use for the past year by the 82 member colleges of the ONC Community College Consortia Program. It is expected that these materials will fill an urgent need in the educational marketplace.

Designed around the six mobile workforce roles identified by ONC, the components are intended to become the building blocks of health IT courses at community colleges and universities. In-service training and continuing education programs at health care institutions and Regional Extension Centers may also benefit from the use of the components. Each component is made up of several units that can be modified and combined to meet the needs of instructors as they design their courses. The components include slide-based lectures with audio narration and transcripts, learning activities, self-assessment questions with answer keys, and instructor manuals.

The components cover topics such as workflow process redesign, technical support, networking, usability, and project management, among others. Three of the components offer a hands-on lab experience for students supported by the VistA for Education electronic health record software package, also available at no cost.

To obtain the materials, go to http://www.onc-ntdc.org/ or http://www.onc-ntdc.info/ to set up a profile and download the components.

Google has announced its planned retirement for Google Health. Google Health was a personal health record (PHR) system, that allowed people to organize, track, monitor, and act on their health information. Due to its limited usage, Google Health will be discontinued on January 1, 2012 and its data will be available to download through January 1, 2013. Users of Google Health can download their information in a variety of formats and will be able to transfer your data to other services that support the Direct Project protocol in the upcoming weeks.

According to Google, the Google Health service was popular with “certain groups of users like tech-savvy patients and their caregivers, and more recently fitness and wellness enthusiasts.” However, Google Health also had an impact in underserved populations in Los Angeles County, through the personal health cyberinfrastructure, HealthATM.

April 14, 2011 marks the release of the MedlinePlus Connect Web Service, which complements the previously released Web Application. The Web Service will give EHRs more flexibility in how they return MedlinePlus information and links to patients and providers. Technical details for how to implement the service is available on the MedlinePlus website. To show how the service responds to request, a Web Service demonstration page was also created. An overview and other information on MedlinePlus Connect remains available at http://medlineplus.com/connect/.

A list of some of the health care organizations and electronic health record systems that are using MedlinePlus Connect was also launched. This is not a comprehensive list; The groups on this list have notified NLM that they are using MedlinePlus and agreed to appear on this page. Organizations or EHR systems who are using MedlinePlus Connect and want to be added to the list can contact NLM through the “Contact Us” link at the top of any MedlinePlus page.

Last month, MedlinePlus Connect received the HHSinnovates Award. MedlinePlus Connect brings patients or health care providers in an EHR to consumer-friendly information directly related to their concerns. MedlinePlus Connect accepts information requests based on coding systems already used by EHRs, and supports the health IT standards used by certified EHR systems as part of the Medicare and Medicaid EHR Incentive Program.

Secretary Kathleen Sebelius has named Dr. Farzad Mostashari as new National Coordinator for Health Information Technology within the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, succeeding Dr. David Blumenthal.

Dr. Mostashari has most recently been ONC Deputy National Coordinator for Programs and Policy. Previously, he served at the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene as Assistant Commissioner for the Primary Care Information Project. He was one of the lead investigators in the outbreaks of West Nile Virus and anthrax in New York City, and among the first developers of real-time electronic disease surveillance systems nationwide.

Read more about Dr. Mostashari at the ONC HIT website.