Abstract
This chapter provides fundamental background about the nature of clinical data and decision making, which will be required for understanding the field of biomedical informatics. It describes various types of clinical data, how clinical data are collected and used by medical professionals, and how they support medical practice and clinical research. It also discusses the rationale behind the transition from paper records to electronic health records (EHRs) for representing clinical data. This chapter concludes with a discussion of the relationship between concepts of data, information, and knowledge, and by introducing concepts relevant to medical decision-making such as sensitivity, specificity, and Bayes’ theorem.
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Notes
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Note that it was the tendency to record such dates in computers as “14FEB12” that led to the end-of-century complexities that were called the Year 2K problem. It was shortsighted to think that it was adequate to encode the year of an event with only two digits.
- 2.
Big Data Senior Steering Group. The Federal Big Data Research and Development Strategic Plan. Available at: 7 https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/sites/default/files/microsites/ostp/NSTC/bigdatardstrategicplan-nitrd_final-051916.pdf (Accessed 6/28/2019).
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7 http://www.icd10data.com/ (Accessed 11/1/2019).
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7 http://snomed.org/ (Accessed 5/6/2019).
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Shortliffe, E.H., Chiang, M.F. (2021). Biomedical Data: Their Acquisition, Storage, and Use. In: Shortliffe, E.H., Cimino, J.J. (eds) Biomedical Informatics. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-58721-5_2
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