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Clinical trial enrollment is impeded by the significant time burden placed on research coordinators screening eligible patients. With 50,000 new cancer cases every year, the Veterans Health Administration (VHA) has made increased access for Veterans to high-quality clinical trials a priority. To aid in this effort, we worked with research coordinators to build the MPACT (Matching Patients to Accelerate Clinical Trials) platform with a goal of improving efficiency in the screening process. MPACT supports both a trial prescreening workflow and a screening workflow, employing Natural Language Processing and Data Science methods to produce reliable phenotypes of trial eligibility criteria. MPACT also has a functionality to track a patient's eligibility status over time. Qualitative feedback has been promising with users reporting a reduction in time spent on identifying eligible patients. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objective: Reducing risk of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) infection among healthcare personnel requires a robust occupational health response involving multiple disciplines. We describe a flexible informatics solution to enable such coordination, and we make it available as open-source software.Materials and Methods: We developed a stand-alone application that integrates data from several sources, including electronic health record data and data captured outside the electronic health record.Results: The application facilitates workflows from different hospital departments, including Occupational Health and Infection Control, and has been used extensively. As of June 2020, 4629 employees and 7768 patients and have been added for tracking by the application, and the application has been accessed over 46 000 times.Discussion: Data captured by the application provides both a historical and real-time view into the operational impact of COVID-19 within the hospital, enabling aggregate and patient-level reporting to support identification of new cases, contact tracing, outbreak investigations, and employee workforce management.Conclusions: We have developed an open-source application that facilitates communication and workflow across multiple disciplines to manage hospital employees impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Capnocytophaga is a gram-negative, capnophilic, facultatively anaerobic bacillus that normally inhabits the oral cavity. We report the case of a patient who developed capnocytophaga bacteremia following autologous bone marrow transplantation for Hodgkin's disease, and we review other reported cases of capnocytophaga bacteremia in immunocompromised patients. In our case infection followed pretransplantation conditioning and was associated with severe oral mucositis and neutropenia. Antibiotic therapy resulted in clinical resolution of infection. Capnocytophaga bacteremia should be included in the differential diagnosis of febrile neutropenia in immunocompromised patients (e.g., those undergoing bone marrow transplantation) especially in the presence of mucositis and gingival bleeding. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Strymish,StewartEvans, BenjaminColonna,MaryT.BrophyandNhanV.Do Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association, 27(11), 2020, 1716-1720, doi:10.1093/jamia/ocaa162 In the originally published version of this article, there was an error in author Stephen J Miller's name. Copyright of Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association is the property of Oxford University Press / USA and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. This work is written by US Government employees and is in the public domain in the US. 674 Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association, 28(3), 2021, 673 doi: 10.1093/jamia/ocaa317 Advance Access Publication Date: 11 December 2020 Corrigendum Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/jamia/article/28/3/673/6031252 by 81695661, OUP on 02 March 2021 © 2021 American Medical Informatics Association. [Extracted from the article]

The author reflects on the roles of health institutions in combating climate change considering how air quality affects health. Topics include the actions of the American College of Physicians on calling the government to respond on the climate issue, the implication of ozone exposure on airway inflammation and risks of respiratory disease, and the establishment of Intermountain Air Quality and Health Workgroup which aim to reduce intermountain air impact to health.