Over the past thirty years, clinical research has benefited substantially from the adoption of electronic medical record systems. As deployment has increased, so too has the number of researchers seeking to improve the overall analytical environment by way of tools and models. Although much work has been done, there are still many uninvestigated…

In low-resource settings, the prioritization of clinical care funding is often determined by immediate health priorities. As a result, investment directed towards the development of standards for clinical data representation and exchange are rare and accordingly, data management systems are often redundant. Open-source systems such as OpenMRS and…

Despite huge growth in hospital technology systems, there remains a dearth of literature examining health care administrator's perceptions of the efficacy of interoperable EHR systems. A qualitative research methodology was used in this multiple-case study to investigate the application of diffusion of innovations theory and the technology…

This dissertation studies information extraction (IE), the problem of extracting structured information from unstructured data. Example IE tasks include extracting person names from news articles, product information from e-commerce Web pages, street addresses from emails, and names of emerging music bands from blogs. IE is all increasingly…

An unprecedented amount of information encompassing almost every facet of human activities across the world is generated daily in the form of zeros and ones, and that is often the only form in which such information is recorded. A good fraction of this information needs to be preserved for periods of time ranging from a few years to centuries.…