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The increasing use of information system has resulted in the accumulation of a large volume of nursing data in electronic medical records. These data have great potential for supporting the various clinical decisions made by physicians, nurses, and managers. However, how to re-use of nursing data remains largely an issue of informatics. The aim of this study was to demonstrate how these nursing data can be used and how much they could contribute to developing a predictive model for an expert system for early detection of acute pancreatitis. We employed a probability-based model consisting of a Bayesian network and trained this model with the patient data retrospectively retrieved from the enterprise data warehouse of a tertiary hospital. The performance of the predictive model was measured based on the error rate and the area under receiver operating characteristics curve, which were 13.89 % and 0.93, respectively. The sensitivity of the acute pancreatitis to the findings from each nursing data was measured using a test of sensitivity. The results showed that the role of nursing data is as important as laboratory data in formulating a model for an expert system.

To improve the use and quality of the electronic Problem List, which is at the heart of the problem-oriented medical record in development in our institution (Intermountain Health Care, Utah, U.S.), we developed an Automated Problem List system using Natural Language Processing (NLP) technologies. A key part of this system is a module that automatically extracts potential medical problems from free-text clinical documents. The NLP module uses MMTx, developed at the U.S. National Library of Medicine. Negation detection was added to this application by adapting a negation detection algorithm called NegEx. To evaluate the adequacy of the performance of the NLP module for our Automated Problem List system, we evaluated it with 160 electronic clinical documents of different types. Two different data sets for MMTx were used: the default full UMLS data set and a customised subset adapted to detect the set of 80 medical problems we are interested in. With the default data set, we measured a recall of 0.74 (95% CI 0.68-0.8) and a precision of 0.76 (0.69-0.82). The customised subset had a significantly better recall of 0.9 (0.85-0.94), and a non-significantly different precision of 0.69 (0.63-0.75).

Background: In busy clinical settings, physicians often do not have enough time to identify patients for specific therapeutic guidelines. As a solution, decision support systems could automatically identify eligible patients and trigger computerized guidelines for specific diseases. Applying this idea to community-acquired pneumonia (CAP), we developed a Bayesian network (BN) and an artificial neural network (ANN) for identifying patients who have CAP and are eligible for a pneumonia guideline., Objective: The aim of this study was to determine whether the diagnostic accuracy of these two decision support models differs in terms of identifying CAP patients., Methods: We trained and tested the networks with a data set of 32,662 adult patients. For each network, we (1) calculated the specificity, the positive predictive value (PPV), and the negative predictive value (NPV) at a sensitivity of 95%, and (2) determined the area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC) as a measure of overall accuracy. We tested for statistical difference between the AUCs using the correlated area z statistic., Results: At a sensitivity of 95%, the respective values for specificity, PPV, and NPV were: 92.3%, 15.1%, and 99.9% for the BN, and 94.0%, 18.6%, and 99.9% for the ANN. The BN had an AUC of 0.9795 (95% CI: 0.9736, 0.9843), and the ANN had an AUC of 0.9855 (95% CI: 0.9805, 0.9894). The difference between the AUCs was statistically significant (p=0.0044)., Conclusions: The networks achieved high overall accuracies on the testing data set. Because the difference in accuracies is statistically significant but not clinically significant, both networks are equally suited to drive a guideline.