News
EOPR – Understanding the Record: an inter-disciplinary colloquium
June 25th, 2012
Dr. Rosemary Tate will be giving a presentation entitled “Developing methods to maximise the use of large primary care databases for research” at a meeting hosted by Kings College London called: “Understanding the Record: an inter-disciplinary colloquium on the problems and opportunities for innovative healthcare recording systems”. This meeting will take place on 28th June at BMA House, Tavistock Square, London.
For more information please visit this link: http://i2btg.inf.kcl.ac.uk/?p=549
EOPR – LREC 2012
May 5th, 2012
We are delighted to announce the acceptance of a new paper entitled “Annotation as a Scientific Task” in the proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2012), Istanbul.
Abstract
Annotation studies in CL are generally unscientific: they are mostly not reproducible, make use of too few (and often non-independent) annotators and use guidelines that are often something of a moving target. Additionally, the notion of ‘expert annotators’ invariably means only that the annotators have linguistic training. While this can be acceptable in some special contexts, it is often far from ideal. This is particularly the case when subtle judgements are required or when, as increasingly, one is making use of corpora originating from technical texts that have been produced by, and intended to be consumed by, an audience of technical experts in the field. We outline a more rigorous approach to collecting human annotations, using as our example a study designed to capture judgements on the meaning of hedge words in medical records.
EOPR – PLoS ONE Publication
March 9th, 2012
The Ergonomics of Patient Records recently contributed to a paper in PLoS ONE entitled “Extracting Diagnoses and Investigation Results from Unstructured Text in Electronic Health Records by Semi-Supervised Machine Learning”, by Zhuoran Wang, Anoop D. Shah, A. Rosemary Tate, Spiros Denaxas, John Shawe-Taylor, Harry Hemingway
for further details please visit the following link: http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0030412
EOPR – HCI Update
February 21st, 2012
We presented the HCI work to the HCI group at the Technical University of Vienna (http://igw.tuwien.ac.at/hci/index.php/about-us). TUV are involved in some interesting work on health and HCI.
We had an intensive two day team workshop to synthesise data and plan future dissemination and papers. We hope to reach a wide audience, so to start with, we are writing one journal paper aimed at General Practitioners and another aimed at social scientists. On the HCI side we are writing a paper for submission to a conference. We have several other potential papers in the pipeline. We are planning a series of workshops to feedback to participating GP surgeries and their staff.
EOPR – IDRN Primary Care Databases Symposium 2012
January 20th, 2012
Dr Liz Ford and Dr Leon Barker will both be presenting posters on PREP’s behalf at the Infectious Disease Research Network’s (IDRN) Primary Care Databases Symposium taking place on 26th – 27th January.
Dr Ford will be presenting a poster titled “GP patient records: How do keywords in free text supplement or validate coded information when studying the timing and incidence of rheumatoid arthritis diagnosis?” and Dr. Barker will be presenting a poster titled “Evaluating the merits for representing patient data in temporal or non-temporal form”.
For further details please visit: http://idrn.org/events/upcoming/primarycaredatabases.php
EOPR – MIXHS 2011 Presentation
November 22nd, 2011
Dr. Rob Koeling presented a paper entitled ‘Automatically Estimating the Incidence of Symptoms Recorded in GP Free Text Notes’ at the 20th ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management as part of the Managing Interoperability and compleXity in Health Systems Programme (MIXHS), 24th – 28th October 2011, Glasgow UK.
ABSTRACT:
Using the UK General Practice Research Database (GPRD) and the coded data supplemented by free text (physicians’ notes and letters), this paper looks at the annotation of 344 womens records in the year prior to a diagnosis of ovarian cancer. By developing a method for automatically detecting mentions of symptoms in text, this lead to an estimation of an incidence of five commonly presenting symptoms using: (1) coded symptoms, (2) codes augmented by symptoms automatically extracted from text, and (3) a ‘gold standard’ dataset of codes and text tagged by three clinically trained annotators. The estimates of incidence of each symptom increased by at least 40% when coded information was enhanced using the manually tagged free text. Our automatic method extracted a significant proportion of this extra information, leading to a straightforward approach which should be extremely useful for medical researchers who wish to validate studies based on codes, or to accurately assess symptoms, using information that can be automatically extracted from unanonymised free text.
For more information about MIXHS 2011, please visit the following link: http://informatics.mayo.edu/CNTRO/index.php/Events/MIXHS11
EOPR – New Members
October 10th, 2011
The PREP Programme would like to welcome both Dr. Liz Ford and Dr. Leon Barker to the team.
Dr. Barker is a Research Fellow in Interactive Visualisation, and Dr. Ford is a Research Fellow in Primary Care Epidemiology. Both will be collaborating withe the team on the Ergonomics of Patient Records programme funded by the Wellcome Trust.
EOPR – RCP 10th Anniversary Celebrations
September 5th, 2011
Prof. Jackie Cassell from the PREP Programme, will be attending the 10th Anniversary Celebration of the Health Informatics Unit at the Royal College of Physicians.
For more information about the Health Informatics Unit, please follow this link: http://hiu.rcplondon.ac.uk/
EOPR – HCI Paper Accepted
August 23rd, 2011
We are delighted to announce that our paper entitled “‘Acted Reality’ in Electronic Patient Record Research: A Bridge between Laboratory and Ethnographic Studies’” has been accepted for the 13th IFIP TC13 Conference on Human-Computer Interaction (Interact ’11).
The paper describes our process, working with actors to develop ‘acted reality’ scenarios as used in our field studies. This conference will take place in Lisbon, Portugal in September 2011, please visit the link below for more information.
EOPR – University of Sussex’s 2011 Research Review
August 18th, 2011
PREP was highlighted in Sussex University’s 2011 Research Review, which launched on June 9th at the University of Sussex Biennial research dinner at the Royal Society, London. The University promotes interdisciplinary collaboration through its six Research Themes, and PREP was chosen to illustrate excellence in collaborative research on the theme of Environment and Health.
A profile of the study, and an interview with Rosemary – along with the rest of the Research Review – can be found through the link below.
http://www.sussex.ac.uk/research/review/2011/environmenthealth
