Carefully designed infographics can be useful tools to support comprehension and thus help patients engage with their own health data. Infographics may contribute to patients' ability to participate in the Learning Health System through participation in the development of a robust data utility, use of clinical communication tools for health self-management, and involvement in building knowledge through patient-reported outcomes.

This research is a key next step in the development of the ICF as a sensitive and universal classification of functional status information. It is worthwhile to continue to investigate automated ICF coding.

During the past several years, social network analysis methods have been used to model many complex real-world phenomena, including social networks, transportation networks, and the Internet. Graph theoretic methods, based on an elegant representation of entities and relationships, have been used in computational biology to study biological networks; however they have not yet been adopted widely by the greater informatics community. The graphs produced are generally large, sparse, and complex, and share common global topological properties. In this review of research (1998-2005) on large-scale semantic networks, we used a tailored search strategy to identify articles involving both a graph theoretic perspective and semantic information. Thirty-one relevant articles were retrieved. The majority (28, 90.3%) involved an investigation of a real-world network. These included corpora, thesauri, dictionaries, large computer programs, biological neuronal networks, word association networks, and files on the Internet. Twenty-two of the 28 (78.6%) involved a graph comprised of words or phrases. Fifteen of the 28 (53.6%) mentioned evidence of small-world characteristics in the network investigated. Eleven (39.3%) reported a scale-free topology, which tends to have a similar appearance when examined at varying scales. The results of this review indicate that networks generated from natural language have topological properties common to other natural phenomena. It has not yet been determined whether artificial human-curated terminology systems in biomedicine share these properties. Large network analysis methods have potential application in a variety of areas of informatics, such as in development of controlled vocabularies and for characterizing a given domain.

We examined outbreak investigations conducted around the world from 1988 to 1999 by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Epidemic Intelligence Service. In 44 (4.0%) of 1,099 investigations, identified causative agents had bioterrorism potential. In six investigations, intentional use of infectious agents was considered. Healthcare providers reported 270 (24.6%) outbreaks and infection control practitioners reported 129 (11.7%); together they reported 399 (36.3%) of the outbreaks. Health departments reported 335 (30.5%) outbreaks. For six outbreaks in which bioterrorism or intentional contamination was possible, reporting was delayed for up to 26 days. We confirmed that the most critical component for bioterrorism outbreak detection and reporting is the frontline healthcare profession and the local health departments. Bioterrorism preparedness should emphasize education and support of this frontline as well as methods to shorten the time between outbreak and reporting.