Papers by Timothy Patrick
WMJ : official publication of the State Medical Society of Wisconsin, 2010
A national study found that infants born in low socioeconomic areas had the worst infant mortalit... more A national study found that infants born in low socioeconomic areas had the worst infant mortality rates (IMRs) and the highest racial disparity. Racial disparities in birth outcomes are also evident in the city of Milwaukee, with African American infants at 3 times greater the risk than white infants. This study was conducted to examine the influence of socioeconomic status (SES) and race on birth outcomes in the city of Milwaukee. Milwaukee ZIP codes were stratified into lower, middle, and upper SES groups. IMR, low birth weight, and preterm birth rates by race were analyzed by SES group for the years 2003 to 2007. The overall IMR for the lower, middle, and upper SES groups were 12.4, 10.7, and 7.7, respectively. The largest racial disparity in IMR (3.1) was in the middle SES group, versus lower (1.6) and upper (1.8) SES groups. The overall percent of low birth weight infants for the lower, middle, and upper SES groups was 10.9%, 9.5%, and 7.5%, respectively. Racial disparity rati...
Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 1990
Perspectives on Language Learning and Education, 2011
Proceedings of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 2008
How do you find health information for your own use? Have digitization and the growth of digital ... more How do you find health information for your own use? Have digitization and the growth of digital records impacted patients, healthcare practitioners, and information managers of medical records? This panel will present research and discuss with the audience how information technology impacts society and individuals. The panelists will share recent findings from their research on the transformation of personal and professional medical and health informatics. Presentations on the application of maps of perceived value, preconceptions about consumers, and the role of web-based communication will show how assumptions about healthcare information are changing the professionals, consumers, and systems. According to many experts in the field of medicine, there is potential for a crisis in the collection and distribution of patient records and community health. In the 1990s the introduction of HIPAA (Health Information Privacy and Accountability Act) regulations protected individual privacy. How have electronic records transformed society and/or information? How is the technology changing information practices? This panel builds on earlier research on these questions as reported at the 2007 ASIS&T Annual Meeting, and it is intended to provide an opportunity to share new findings about recent transformations.
Topics in Early Childhood Special Education, 2011
Social computing in the domain of health care is a vital, growing activity on the web. Patients, ... more Social computing in the domain of health care is a vital, growing activity on the web. Patients, family, and healthcare professionals seek answers and share information. Knowledge management issues about accessing data and cultivating users have not been resolved. This panel has experiences to share based on research into the problems and issues that can separate each of us from personal medical and health records. Sometimes academic research in information science is separated by policies and practices from impacting the design of medical/healthcare world's information applications. Reliability and quality in health information and knowledge depend on bridging this gap.
AMIA ... Annual Symposium proceedings / AMIA Symposium. AMIA Symposium
There is a compelling need for standardized coding schemes to represent data collected for childr... more There is a compelling need for standardized coding schemes to represent data collected for children receiving services through Milwaukee County early intervention (Birth to 3) programs. We are standardizing Birth to 3 data in our ongoing development of the Early Childhood Integrated Database System. Our efforts balance the need for individualized service plans with the need for aggregate analysis.
AMIA ... Annual Symposium proceedings / AMIA Symposium. AMIA Symposium, 2003
If clinical questions are to be used on a large scale as a practitioner interface to the medical ... more If clinical questions are to be used on a large scale as a practitioner interface to the medical knowledge base, improved methods must be developed for the semantic management of question corpora. In this project we investigate the use of description logic to manage question corpora. We propose the addition of a Q-box to a standard Description Logic knowledge base. The Q-box will contain concept descriptions that are not yet accepted as part of the T-box, but in effect represent questions about concepts already described in the T-box.
Studies in health technology and informatics, 2004
In this chapter we address the issue of standards for information retrieval to support decision m... more In this chapter we address the issue of standards for information retrieval to support decision making in e-health. Specifically, we consider the issue of evidence-based retrieval in the e-health domains of the consumer, healthcare practitioner, healthcare researcher, and genomics researcher. We present the results of a preliminary study to assess the current state of evidence-based retrieval in e-health. Within this study, we reviewed articles in e-health and telemedicine to determine the extent to which authors provide details of the information retrieval strategies used, as well as evidence of the effectiveness of those strategies. We also examined the extent to which the associated journals require authors of reviews to explicitly provide details of information retrieval strategies that they used, as well as reporting any evidence for the effectiveness of those strategies.
Informatics in primary care, 2004
Several initiatives have addressed patient safety by enabling electronic voluntary reporting of a... more Several initiatives have addressed patient safety by enabling electronic voluntary reporting of adverse events within academic medical centres in urban settings. Such initiatives are lacking in the rural context, and it remains unknown whether the same challenges and solutions apply to rural hospitals. The purpose of this study is to provide insight into the organisational culture and level of readiness to adopt patient safety strategies in a rural setting, as well as to identify critical issues pertaining to the rural context that need to inform the design of such strategies. We conducted telephone interviews with administrators and healthcare providers of rural hospitals in one US state. Questions referred to the respondents' current reporting mechanism, its advantages and disadvantages, and organisational patient safety culture. A total of 16 administrators and 14 providers of eight rural hospitals in the state of Missouri were interviewed. Findings indicate that very few adm...
AMIA ... Annual Symposium proceedings / AMIA Symposium. AMIA Symposium, 2008
Semantic interoperability requires consistent use of controlled terminologies. However, non-termi... more Semantic interoperability requires consistent use of controlled terminologies. However, non-terminology experts (although perhaps experts in a particular domain) are prone to produce variant coding. We examine this problem by investigating SNOMED CT coding variation for other findings reported on case report forms from a clinical research study on urea cycle disorders. The natural language findings from the forms were normalized, and the associated SNOMED CT concept descriptions were compared. The subset of normalized strings associated with two different concept descriptions were further compared to determine the relationship among the associated SNOMED CT concepts. We found 45% of the concept description pairs were associated with two hierarchically related concepts or with the same concept, while 55% were associated with two unrelated concepts. Clearer guidelines for use of SNOMED CT in particular contexts, or structured data entry tools tailored to the needs of non-expert coders...
2008 International Conference on BioMedical Engineering and Informatics, 2008
Abstract E-Health involves new forms of patient-physician interaction and poses new ethical chall... more Abstract E-Health involves new forms of patient-physician interaction and poses new ethical challenges and threats to patient privacy. This paper reviews Health On the Net Foundation Code of Conduct (HONcode) accredited e-Health websites that provide online ...
Proceedings of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 2005
Physical & Occupational Therapy in Pediatrics, 2010
This descriptive study examined the readability levels of Individualized Family Service Plans (IF... more This descriptive study examined the readability levels of Individualized Family Service Plans (IFSPs). The readability of 85 de-identified IFSP documents developed by seven agencies that serve families and children enrolled in a county early intervention program was analyzed using Flesch Kincaid grade levels and Flesch reading ease scores. The average Flesch Kincaid grade level of the entire IFSP documents was 8.0, indicating that the text was written at the 8th grade reading level. The Flesch reading ease mean score for all of the IFSP documents was 58.6, indicating that the text was written at a moderate level of ease to read. The highest Flesch Kincaid grade level scores and lowest reading ease scores were found in sections that require descriptive documentation of IFSP activities and ideas, justification for services provided outside of the natural environment, the way in which outcomes would be met, and a description of the activities provided in the natural environment. The lowest Flesch Kincaid grade level and the highest reading ease level were found in the section involving gross motor development. There were no agencies that prepared IFSP documents at or below the recommended 5th grade reading level. The findings from this study indicated that on average the entire IFSP documents and most sections of the documents were written above a 5th grade reading level. Overall there were no agencies that wrote the IFSP documents at or below the recommended 5th grade reading level. Analysis of readability levels when preparing IFSP documents is recommended to optimize accessibility and usability.
Journal of the Medical Library Association, 2007
Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association, 2003
Physicians need better access to information when making patient care decisions. Hospitals should... more Physicians need better access to information when making patient care decisions. Hospitals should allow electronic data transfers to physician PDAs to improve patient care, and physicians must institute measures to secure the confidentiality of patient information on their PDAs. By explicitly excluding copies from their designated record set, hospitals need not maintain copies or track access of information on personally owned PDAs.
Journal of Biomedical Informatics, 2008
Objective. A continual problem confronting the implementation of standardized vocabularies such a... more Objective. A continual problem confronting the implementation of standardized vocabularies such as SNOMED CT is that their expressive flexibility and power provide more than one way to represent a given concept. The goal of this study was to investigate how the CliniClue TM Expression Transformer tool could be used to help in discerning similarities and differences among three separate sets of clinical research concepts coded in SNOMED CT by three different paid expert coding companies.
Infants & Young Children, 2010
ABSTRACT Functional health literacy, a component of health literacy, refers to the ability to rea... more ABSTRACT Functional health literacy, a component of health literacy, refers to the ability to read and interpret medical information. The Short Test of Functional Health Literacy in Adults (S-TOFHLA) measures the ability to read and interpret medical information. The purpose of this pilot study was to assess and compare levels of maternal functional health literacy using the S-TOFHLA and to determine whether a relationship exists between functional health literacy and symptoms of maternal mental health in a sample of mothers whose children were enrolled in early intervention programs in urban (n = 25) and suburban/rural (n = 25) Midwestern counties. Results showed that all mothers had adequate functional health literacy as determined by the S-TOFHLA. There were significant correlations between functional health literacy, annual income, and level of education, but not between functional health literacy, maternal depression, and posttraumatic stress symptom levels. Although mothers had adequate functional health literacy and their scores were not related to maternal mental health symptoms, previous research indicates that families have difficulty understanding and using early intervention program literature. The findings from the current study suggest that the difficulty parents have using early intervention program literature may not be isolated to the ability to read health-related information. Rather, the difficulty parents experience in using early intervention program literature may be due to a complex interaction between functional, interactive, and critical health literacy.
Arthritis Care & Research, 1998
To identify innovative strategies to support appropriate, self-directed exercise that increase ph... more To identify innovative strategies to support appropriate, self-directed exercise that increase physical activity levels of people with arthritis. This article reports on one interactive, multimedia exercise performance support system (PSS) for people with lower extremity impairments in strength or flexibility. An interdisciplinary team developed the PSS using self-report of lower extremity musculoskeletal impairments (flexibility and strength) to produce an individualized exercise program with video and print educational materials. Initial evaluation has investigated the validity and reliability of program assessments and recommendations. PSS self-report and professional assessments were similar, with more impairments indicated by self-report. PSS exercise recommendations were similar to those made by 3 expert physical therapists using the same exercise data base. Results of PSS impairment assessments were stable over a 1-week period. PSS exercise recommendations appear to be reliable and a valid reflection of current exercise knowledge in rheumatology. Furthermore, users were able to complete the computer-based program with minimal assistance and reported it to be enjoyable and informative.
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Papers by Timothy Patrick