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Health Informatics Glossary
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AAFP -
The American Academy of Family Physicians
is a medical specialty society that represents 90,000 physicians and medical
students. The Mission of the AAFP is to improve the health of patients,
families and communities by serving the needs of members with professionalism
and creativity. See
CCR,
PCMH
AANP -
American Association of Nurse
Practitioners. See
AAPA
AAP -
American Academy of Pediatrics.
See
CCR,
PCMH
AAPA -
American Academy of Physician Assistants.
See
AANP
ABAC -
Attribute Based Access Control. See
AC,
PBAC,
RBAC
AC -
Access Control (AC) is accomplished by hardware, software or operating
policies that control access to facilities, computer devices and
computerized systems (from an individual program to a network).
See
ABAC,
ACL,
Authentication,
Authorization,
Non-repudiation,
PBAC,
RBAC
ACA -
("AW-kuh") The Affordable Care Act, sometimes called
"Obamacare." It's full name is PPACA. See
ACO,
PPACA
ACC -
American College of Cardiology
Acceptance Testing -
A formal quality assurance process that allows users to impose standard
performance tests on a newly delivered software or computer system prior to
production use of the system. See
Unit Test
Access Control -
See
AC
Top of Page
Access Point -
A radio transceiver for wireless LAN access. A wi-fi base station.
See
LAN,
Wi-Fi
Accreditation -
Voluntary certification conferred by a professional organization, such as
NCQA or TJC. See
NCQA,
TJC
ACK -
A response flag in TCP to acknowledge receipt of a packet. The term is also
used generically in other data networking contexts to acknowledge receipt of
a message or a handshake, including HL7. See
TCP
ACL -
Access Control List. See
AC
ACO -
Accountable Care Organization. See
ACA,
PPACA
ACP -
American College of Physicians.
See
PCMH
Acute Care -
Health care typically delivered to a patient in a hospital and generally
involving at least one overnight stay. See
Ambulatory Care,
Inpatient,
Outpatient,
Patient
ADA -
American Dental Association
ADT -
Admission-Discharge-Transfer, the transactional data set, typically in a
hospital information system, that maintains and updates the patient census
by noting the time and date of each transition in patient status or location.
Also, the HL7 message stream for the data set. See
HL7
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Admission -
The process of a patient being admitted to a hospital. See
ADT
Adware -
Short for "advertising supported software," a category of software which
automatically renders advertisements. Most adware is harmless. However
adware is also used as a method of attack for the insertion of spyware,
such as keyloggers and other info-stealers. See
Infostealer,
Keylogging,
Malware
Adverse Event -
An adverse event is an injury caused by medical management,
rather than by the underlying condition of the patient.
Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality -
See
AHRQ
Agent -
Computer software programmed to automate a task, such as searching
for specific information in a data rich environment.
Aggregated Data -
A set of data compiled for activities such as Public Health or
clinical research. Aggregated data sets are typically intended
to be unidentifiable at the level of an individual person, however
the recent appearance of massively popular social networking sites
on the internet has been shown to enable reidentification of
individuals in data sets previously assumed to be de-identified.
See
De-identified_Data,
Re-identified_Data
AHA -
American Hospital Association
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AHIC -
The American Health Information Community was a 17 member federal advisory
body assembled in 2005 to make recommendations to the Secretary of the U.S.
Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) on how to accelerate the
development and adoption of health information technology. AHIC was
transitioned to the private sector in 2008 by the outgoing Bush
administration and renamed the National
eHealth Collaborative. See
HHS,
NeHC,
ONC
AHIMA -
American Health Information Management
Association See
CHIME,
EHRA,
HIMSS
AHIP -
America's Health Insurance Plans
AHLTA -
The Armed forces Health Longitudinal Technology Application. See
CHCS
AHRQ -
The Agency for Healthcare Research and
Quality is major division in the U. S. Department of
Health and Human Services. The mission of
AHRQ is to improve the quality, safety, efficiency, and effectiveness of
health care for all Americans. See
Effectiveness,
HHS,
NQF
AIRA -
American Immunization Registry
Association, publisher of
HL7
Implementation Guides for Immunization Messaging. See
HL7,
CVX,
MVX,
QBP,
VXU
AJAX -
Acronym for a creative mash up of software technologies, classic Ajax includes
asynchronous JavaScript and XML. Collectively the Ajax techniques, and its
descendants, enable client side web development of richly featured
asynchronous web applications. See
DHTML,
JavaScript,
JSON,
REST,
XML
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Algorithm -
A method of problem solving in which instructions are followed in a (usually)
specific sequence. Algorithms may involve numeric calculation. See
Care Pathway,
Expert System,
Guideline,
Inference Engine,
Protocol
AMA -
American Medical Association
See
CCR,
CPT
Ambulatory Care -
A health care consultation delivered on an outpatient basis. See
Acute Care,
Inpatient,
Patient,
Outpatient
AMIA -
American Medical Informatics
Association, a national member society of IMIA.
See
IMIA,
Informatics,
MedInfo,
Nursing Informatics,
PII
ANA -
American Nurses Association
Analog -
An analog signal is continuous in time and amplitude, as opposed to a
digital signal, which is discrete. Legacy voice grade phone systems, sometimes
called Plain Old Telephone Service (POTS), use analog circuits.
See
Broadband,
Dialup,
Digital,
POTS,
Signal,
VoIP
Analytics -
See
BI
Top of Page
Ancestor -
In a concept hierarchy, an ancestor is a concept that is located above a
specific concept in the hierarchy. Example: in SNOMED CT, cardiovascular
disease is an ancestor of myocardial infarction. See
Concept,
Descendant,
Generalization,
Hierarchy,
SNOMED,
Superconcept
Anonymize -
A filtering process intended to transform data into a format which does not
allow determination of the specific identity to whom the data refers.
See
De-identified Data
ANSI -
[ ANN-sea ] The American
National Standards Institute is the U.S. member body to the
ISO. ANSI does not write standards; rather
the Institute accredits standards developers that will establish consensus
among qualified groups. See
HITSP,
ISO,
NCPDP,
SDO
Answering Machine -
A simple analog or digital device to record messages on a telephone.
See
Voice Mail
AOA -
American Osteopathic Association.
See
PCMH
APA -
American Psychological Association
APHA -
American Public Health Association
APHL -
Association of Public Health Laboratories
API -
Application program interface.
See
DNT
Application -
Computer program that carries out a specific task, such as a
"word processing application" or an LIS or EHR.
See
EHR,
LIS
ARRA -
[ ARR-uh ] The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act
of 2009, a $787 billion stimulus measure signed into law by President Obama
on February 17, 2009. The HITECH portion of the law provided subsidies for
aggressive private sector investment in health IT. See
Cal eConnect,
CalHIPSO,
HITECH,
IT,
MU,
REC,
SDE
Top of Page
ASCII -
[ ASS-key] American Standard Code for Information
Interchange, a character encoding scheme originally based on the English
alphabet. The first edition was published in 1963. See
Blue Button
ASP -
Application Service Provider, a type of Client-Server installation where a
business hosts computer-based services for customers to access across a
network, such as EHR or PMS solutions accessed over the Internet. The
traditional topology to provision ASP services assumes there is a single
server hosting the application(s).
See
Client-Server,
Cloud Computing,
EHR,
PMS,
SaaS
ASTHO -
[ AS-tow ] Association
of State and Territorial Health Officials is a non-profit membership
association representing the chiefs of state and territorial health
agencies. See
Biosurveillance,
CDC,
CDPH,
CSTE,
ISDS,
NACCHO,
WHO
ASTM -
The American Society for Testing and Materials
began as a domestic engineering standards body and later evolved into an
international standards organization (ISO). See
CCR,
ISO,
SDO
ATNA -
The Audit Trail and Node Authentication service establishes the
characteristics of a basic secure node in an IHE
environment. See
IHE
Attribute -
A functional or descriptive data element in a terminology. See
Concept,
Data Element,
Terminology
Attribute Value -
See
Key-value
Audit Log -
Record created by hardware (servers, routers, firewalls, etc.) or software
(data bases, network systems, individual applications, etc.) that track when
data are created, modified, transmitted or destroyed, including the identity
of the user initiating the action.
Authentication -
The physical or process method or methods employed to prove that the person
or entity seeking access to information has the proper authorization.
Generally used to protect confidential information by limiting system access
to authorized users. Passwords are an example of a commonly employed
authentication process. See
Access Control,
Authorization,
Encryption,
Non-repudiation
Top of Page
Authority -
The organization responsible for creation and maintenance of a terminology or
a vocabulary. For example, IHTSDO is the
authority responsible for SNOMECD CT. See
IHTSDO,
SDO,
Terminology,
Vocabulary
Authorization -
A system established to grant access to generally confidential information.
Authorization establishes the level of access by an individual or entity to
data based on the identity established by an authentication process.
See
Access_Control,
Authentication,
Consent
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