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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
AANP - American
Academy of Nurse Practitioners
AAP - American
Academy of Pediatrics
ACA - ("AW-kuh") Affordable Care Act.
See 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 -
Hardware, software or operating policies that control access
to facilities, computer devices and computerized systems (from
an individual program to a network). See
Authentication,
Authorization,
Non-repudiation
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Access Point -
Common term for radio transceiver for wireless LAN access, also
known as 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
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
Admission - The process of
a patient being admitted to a hospital.
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.
top
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
AHIC -
American Health
Information Community, formerly 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. Disbanded in 2008, and succeeded by the
National eHealth
Collaborative. See
HHS,
NeHC,
ONC
AHIMA   -
American Health Information
Management Association
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
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AIRA -
American Immunization
Registry Association, publisher of the Implementation
Guide for Immunization Messaging for HL7 v2.5.1.
See HL7,
CVX,
MVX,
QDP,
VXU
Ajax - Acronym for a combination of
technologies, classic Ajax includes asynchronous JavaScript and XML.
See
JavaScript,
REST,
XML
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
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
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
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
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Answering Machine - A simple analog or
digital device to record messages on a telephone.
See
Voice Mail
APA - American Psychological
Association
APHA - American
Public Health Association
APHL - Association
of Public Health Laboratories
API - Application program interface
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. A portion of the law provides funding for aggressive health
IT spending. See
Cal eConnect,
CalHIPSO,
HITECH,
REC,
SDE
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. See
Client-Server,
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
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ASTM -
American Society for Testing and
Materials began as a domestic engineering standards
body later evolved into an international standards organization
(ISO). See
CCR,
ISO
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
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
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