Includes section, "Recent book acquisitions" (varies: Recent United States publications) formerly published separately by the U.S. Army Medical Library.

This book brings together results from different branches of computer science (in particular, artificial intelligence), medical informatics and medicine to examine cutting edge approaches to computer-based guideline modeling, verification and interpretation. Different methods have been developed to support the development, deployment, maintenance and use of evidence-based guidelines, using techniques from artificial intelligence, software engineering, medical informatics and formal methods. Such methods employ different representation formalisms and computational techniques. As the guideline-related research spans a wide range of research communities, a comprehensive integration of the results of these communities was lacking. It is the intention of this book to fill this gap. It is the first book of its kind that partially has the nature of a textbook. The book consists of two parts. The first part consists of nine chapters which together offer a comprehensive overview of the most important medical and computer-science aspects of clinical guidelines and protocols. The second part of the book consists of chapters that are extended versions of selected papers that were originally submitted to the ECAI-2006 workshop ‘AI Techniques in Health Care: Evidence-based Guidelines and Protocols’. These chapters will provide the reader detailed information about actual research in the area by leading researchers.

Nearly half of states require or request the reporting of adverse medical events. In 2003, the Institute of Medicine (Patient Safety: Achieving a New Standard of Care) called for the use of consistent standards for medical error reporting. Standardization will facilitate the creation of a national patient safety repository that aggregates data from states and enable policymakers to track trends in adverse events nationally. The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) is leading the national Patient Safety Initiative to combat medical errors. This report summarizes the results of an AHRQ sponsored 50-state survey of adverse reporting systems in 2004. It documents the consistency of information that states are collecting as part of their reporting systems, identifies issues related to establishing a national patient safety repository, and presents an action plan to implement a standardized nationwide system elicited from an external advisory panel that was convened explicitly for this purpose.