Egems

Lasiodiplodia theobromae is a fungal pathogen associated with perennial tropical fruit plants worldwide. In citrus, L. theobromae causes stem-end rot (Diplodia stem-end rot), a damaging postharvest disease that is aggravated when trees are also infected with the citrus greening bacteria ' Candidatus Liberibacter asiaticus'. Due to the latent infection of L. theobromae during the preharvest stage, it becomes difficult to control the disease by chemical or physical treatment. In the current study, we sequenced and assembled strain CITRA15, the first genome of L...

This issue of eGEMS focuses on application of data science as a driver of health care transformation. Importantly, quantitative or qualitative analysis with a particular method is only one downstream step in the process of leveraging data. Effective analytics occurs on a continuum with multiple complementary phases, categorized here as data acquisition, ensuring or enhancing data access and usability, data analysis, and dissemination. Each of these activities is encompassed in the series of papers presented...

eGEMs , in close partnership with our key sponsor and publisher, AcademyHealth, has provided a window to the transformational impact of electronic health data (EHD) on how we pursue health and deliver healthcare. This commentary traces key milestones in that journey and announces the next chapter for this community and the critical work it produces.

This commentary introduces the Patient-Centered Clinical Decision Support (PCCDS) Learning Network, which is collaborating with AcademyHealth to publish "Better Decisions Together" as part of eGEMs . Patient-centered clinical decision support (CDS) is an important vehicle to address broad issues in the U.S. health care system regarding quality and safety while also achieving better outcomes and better patient and provider satisfaction. Defined as CDS that supports individual patients and their care givers and/or care teams in health-related decisions and actions, PCCDS is an important step forward in advancing endeavors to move patient-centered care forward...

Introduction: The New York City (NYC) Macroscope is an electronic health record (EHR) surveillance system based on a distributed network of primary care records from the Hub Population Health System. In a previous 3-part series published in eGEMS , we reported the validity of health indicators from the NYC Macroscope; however, questions remained regarding their generalizability to other EHR surveillance systems. Methods: We abstracted primary care chart data from more than 20 EHR software systems for 142 participants of the 2013-14 NYC Health and Nutrition Examination Survey who did not contribute data to the NYC Macroscope...

In September 2015 the EDM Forum hosted AcademyHealth's newest national conference, Concordium. The 11 papers featured in the eGEMs "Concordium 2015" special issue successfully reflect the major themes and issues discussed at the meeting. Many of the papers address informatics or methodological approaches to natural language processing (NLP) or text analysis, which is indicative of the importance of analyzing text data to gain insights into care coordination and patient-centered outcomes. Perspectives on the tools and infrastructure requirements that are needed to build learning health systems were also recurrent themes...

"Open science" includes a variety of approaches to facilitate greater access to data and the information produced by processes of scientific inquiry. Recently, the health sciences community has been grappling with the issue of potential pathways and models to achieve the goals of open science-namely, to create and rapidly share reproducible health research. eGEMs' continued dedication to and milestones regarding the publication of innovative, useful, and timely research to help contribute to the push towards open science is discussed, as well as the EDM Forum's new data sharing platform, CIELO...

INTRODUCTION: In this special issue of eGEMs, we explore the struggles related to bringing evidence into day-to-day practice, what I define as the "evidence gap." We are all aware of high quality evidence in the form of guidelines, randomized clinical trials for treatments and diagnostic tests, and clinical prediction rules, which are all readily available online. We also know that electronic health records (EHRs) are now ubiquitous in health care and in most practices across the country...

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES: Advances in technology present opportunities to develop and test innovative teaching methods. We sought to evaluate whether text messaging could improve medical resident knowledge in musculoskeletal medicine. METHODS: Eleven U.S. family medicine residency programs with a total of 269 residents participated in this randomized, controlled trial. Residents were invited to complete a pretest to assess musculoskeletal medicine knowledge. The residents randomized to the intervention group were then offered to receive text messages termed electronically Generated Educational Messages (eGEMs) three times per week during a 12-week period...

BACKGROUND: The Electronic Data Methods (EDM) Forum, with support from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, exists to advance knowledge and practice on the use of electronic clinical data (ECD) for comparative effectiveness research, patient-centered outcomes research, and quality improvement (QI). The EDM Forum facilitates collaboration between the Prospective Outcome Systems using Patient-specific Electronic data to Compare Tests and therapies, Scalable Distributed Research Network, and Enhanced registry projects funded by Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality...