We introduce the first meta-service for information extraction in molecular biology, the BioCreative MetaServer (BCMS; http://bcms.bioinfo.cnio.es/). This prototype platform is a joint effort of 13 research groups and provides automatically generated annotations for PubMed/Medline abstracts. Annotation types cover gene names, gene IDs, species, and protein-protein interactions. The annotations are distributed by the meta-server in both human and machine readable formats (HTML/XML). This service is intended to be used by biomedical researchers and database annotators, and in biomedical language processing. The platform allows direct comparison, unified access, and result aggregation of the annotations.

Brute health information delivery to various devices can be easily achieved these days, making health information instantly available whenever it is needed and nearly anywhere. However, brute health information delivery risks overloading users with unnecessary information that does not answer their actual needs, and might even act as noise, masking any other useful and relevant information delivered with it. Users' profiles and needs are definitely affected by where they are, and this should be taken into consideration when personalising and delivering information to users in different locations. The main goal of location-based health information services is to allow better presentation of the distribution of health and healthcare needs and Internet resources answering them across a geographical area, with the aim to provide users with better support for informed decision-making. Personalised information delivery requires the acquisition of high quality metadata about not only information resources, but also information service users, their geographical location and their devices. Throughout this review, experience from a related online health information service, HealthCyberMap http://healthcybermap.semanticweb.org/, is referred to as a model that can be easily adapted to other similar services. HealthCyberMap is a Web-based directory service of medical/health Internet resources exploring new means to organise and present these resources based on consumer and provider locations, as well as the geographical coverage or scope of indexed resources. The paper also provides a concise review of location-based services, technologies for detecting user location (including IP geolocation), and their potential applications in health and healthcare.

The European Nucleotide Archive (ENA; http://www.ebi.ac.uk/ena) is a repository for the world public domain nucleotide sequence data output. ENA content covers a spectrum of data types including raw reads, assembly data and functional annotation. ENA has faced a dramatic growth in genome assembly submission rates, data volumes and complexity of datasets. This has prompted a broad reworking of assembly submission services, for which we now reach the end of a major programme of work and many enhancements have already been made available over the year to components of the submission service. In this article, we briefly review ENA content and growth over 2013, describe our rapidly developing services for genome assembly information and outline further major developments over the last year.

Text-mining in molecular biology -- defined as the automatic extraction of information about genes, proteins and their functional relationships from text documents -- has emerged as a hybrid discipline on the edges of the fields of information science, bioinformatics and computational linguistics. A range of text-mining applications have been developed recently that will improve access to knowledge for biologists and database annotators.

Advanced technology has increased the use of telemedicine and Information Technology (IT) in treating or rehabilitating diseases. An increased use of technology increases the importance of the ethical issues involved. The need for keeping patients' information confidential and secure, controlling a number of therapists' inefficiency as well as raising the quality of healthcare services necessitates adequate heed to ethical issues in telemedicine provision.

Pain relief always plays the essential part of perioperative care and an important role of medical quality improvement. Patient-controlled analgesia (PCA) is a method that allows a patient to self-administer small boluses of analgesic to relieve the subjective pain. PCA logs from the infusion pump consisted of a lot of text messages which record all events during the therapies. The dosage information can be extracted from PCA logs to provide easily understanding features. The analysis of dosage information with time has great help to figure out the variance of a patient's pain relief condition. To explore the trend of pain relief requirement, we developed a PCA dosage information generator (PCA DIG) to extract meaningful messages from PCA logs during the first 48 hours of therapies. PCA dosage information including consumption, delivery, infusion rate, and the ratio between demand and delivery is presented with corresponding values in 4 successive time frames. Time-dependent statistical analysis demonstrated the trends of analgesia requirements decreased gradually along with time. These findings are compatible with clinical observations and further provide valuable information about the strategy to customize postoperative pain management.

Robust, programmatically accessible biomedical information services that syntactically and semantically interoperate with other resources are challenging to construct. Such systems require the adoption of common information models, data representations and terminology standards as well as documented application programming interfaces (APIs). The National Cancer Institute (NCI) developed the cancer common ontologic representation environment (caCORE) to provide the infrastructure necessary to achieve interoperability across the systems it develops or sponsors. The caCORE Software Development Kit (SDK) was designed to provide developers both within and outside the NCI with the tools needed to construct such interoperable software systems.

Respite care is one of the most frequently requested support services by family caregivers. Yet, too often, respite care services are inaccessible, due in part to families' lack of knowledge regarding available services and a lack of service flexibility. Information and communication technologies (ICTs) may help to improve the flexibility of services available and families' knowledge of such services. However, an understanding of the use of ICTs and research in this area is lacking.

It is essential for the strategy of open access self-archiving that scientific authors are given comprehensive information on publisher copyright policies. DINI, the German Initiative for Networked Information, has developed a German (and potentially multilingual) interface to the English SHERPA/RoMEO service to provide additional information on German publishers' open access policies. As a next step, this interface was enhanced to an integration layer combining different sources on publisher copyright policies. This integration layer can be used in many different contexts. Together with the SHERPA/RoMEO team, DINI aims to build an international support structure for open access information.

Social network characteristics influence a wide range of health behaviors but few studies examine the relationship between social network characteristics and pregnancy-related outcomes.

PubChem (http://pubchem.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov) is a public repository for information on chemical substances and their biological activities, developed and maintained by the US National Institutes of Health (NIH). PubChem contains more than 180 million depositor-provided chemical substance descriptions, 60 million unique chemical structures and 225 million bioactivity assay results, covering more than 9000 unique protein target sequences. As an information resource for the chemical biology research community, it routinely receives more than 1 million requests per day from an estimated more than 1 million unique users per month. Programmatic access to this vast amount of data is provided by several different systems, including the US National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI)'s Entrez Utilities (E-Utilities or E-Utils) and the PubChem Power User Gateway (PUG)-a common gateway interface (CGI) that exchanges data through eXtended Markup Language (XML). Further simplifying programmatic access, PubChem provides two additional general purpose web services: PUG-SOAP, which uses the simple object access protocol (SOAP) and PUG-REST, which is a Representational State Transfer (REST)-style interface. These interfaces can be harnessed in combination to access the data contained in PubChem, which is integrated with the more than thirty databases available within the NCBI Entrez system.

Organizations try to outsource their activities as much as possible in order to prevent the problems and use organizational capabilities in Information Technology (IT) field. The purpose of this paper was first, to express the effective criteria for selecting suppliers of IT services, second, to explain the advantages and disadvantages of outsourcing IT in hospitals. This study was narrative review, which search was conducted with the help of libraries, books, conference proceedings, and databases of Science Direct, PubMed, Proquest, Springer, and SID (Scientific Information Database). In our searches, we employed the following keywords and their combinations: Outsourcing, information technology, hospital, decision making, and criteria. The preliminary search resulted in 120 articles, which were published between 2000 and 2013 during July 2013. After a careful analysis of the content of each paper, a total of 46 papers were selected based on their relevancy. The criteria and sub-criteria influencing outsourcing decisions in Iranian hospitals were identified in six major categories including administrative issues, issues related to the service/product, technology factors, environmental factors, risks, and economic factors associated with 15 sub-criteria containing business integration, dependence on suppliers, human resources, focus on core competencies, facilities and physical capital, innovation, quality, speed of service delivery, flexibility, market capabilities, geographical location, security, management control, cost, and financial capability. Identify the advantages and disadvantages of outsourcing and effective criteria in IT services supplier selection causes the managers be able to take the most appropriate decision to select supplier of IT services. This is a general review on influencing criteria for electing of supplier of information technology services in hospitals.

The transition to a largely Internet and Web-based environment for dissemination of health information has changed the health information landscape and the framework for evaluation of such activities. A multidimensional evaluative approach is needed.

Pet owners rely on information and advice from their veterinary practice to effectively manage their pet's weight. This study investigated weight management information and services displayed on practice websites in Ontario, Canada. Information collected from the websites of 50 randomly selected small and mixed-animal practices included practice and staff demographics and the type of weight management services, products, and information advertised or displayed. The most frequently advertised weight management service and product were nutritional counselling (34%) and therapeutic diets (25%), respectively. Current bodyweight measurement was advertised on just over half of the websites (54%), while physical therapy counselling was the least-advertised service (16%). Further statistical analyses were performed in an exploratory fashion to determine areas for future research. Binary logistic regression analyses were used to investigate the association between practice demographics and the type of weight management information advertised online. A maximum of two predictor variables were included in each regression model. Exploratory analyses indicated that when controlling for the number of veterinarians in each practice, having a higher number of veterinary technicians was associated with increased odds of a practice website advertising current bodyweight measurement by 80.1% (odds ratio (OR) = 1.80, p = 0.05). Additionally, when controlling the number of veterinary technicians, having a higher number of veterinarians was associated with increased odds of a practice website advertising sales of therapeutic diets by 119.0% (OR = 2.19, p = 0.04). When using corporate practices as reference, independently owned practices had decreased odds of advertising sales of treats and weight management accessories on their practice websites by 78.7% (OR = 0.21, p = 0.03). These preliminary results suggest that advertising weight management information is not prioritized on veterinary practice websites in Ontario, especially those with lower staff numbers. The findings of this study raise awareness on the current state of weight management promotion for pets on veterinary practice websites and highlight ways to improve upon a practice's online presence.

During the past years, the advances in high-throughput technologies have produced an unprecedented growth in the number and size of repositories and databases storing relevant biological data. Today, there is more biological information than ever but, unfortunately, the current status of many of these repositories is far from being optimal. Some of the most common problems are that the information is spread out in many small databases; frequently there are different standards among repositories and some databases are no longer supported or they contain too specific and unconnected information. In addition, data size is increasingly becoming an obstacle when accessing or storing biological data. All these issues make very difficult to extract and integrate information from different sources, to analyze experiments or to access and query this information in a programmatic way. CellBase provides a solution to the growing necessity of integration by easing the access to biological data. CellBase implements a set of RESTful web services that query a centralized database containing the most relevant biological data sources. The database is hosted in our servers and is regularly updated. CellBase documentation can be found at http://docs.bioinfo.cipf.es/projects/cellbase.

The national incidence and characteristics of out-of-hospital cardiac arrest in the United States is unclear. We sought to describe the national characteristics of adult out-of-hospital cardiac arrest reported in the National Emergency Medical Services Information System (NEMSIS).

The term "Geographic Information Systems" (GIS) has been added to MeSH in 2003, a step reflecting the importance and growing use of GIS in health and healthcare research and practices. GIS have much more to offer than the obvious digital cartography (map) functions. From a community health perspective, GIS could potentially act as powerful evidence-based practice tools for early problem detection and solving. When properly used, GIS can: inform and educate (professionals and the public); empower decision-making at all levels; help in planning and tweaking clinically and cost-effective actions, in predicting outcomes before making any financial commitments and ascribing priorities in a climate of finite resources; change practices; and continually monitor and analyse changes, as well as sentinel events. Yet despite all these potentials for GIS, they remain under-utilised in the UK National Health Service (NHS). This paper has the following objectives: (1) to illustrate with practical, real-world scenarios and examples from the literature the different GIS methods and uses to improve community health and healthcare practices, e.g., for improving hospital bed availability, in community health and bioterrorism surveillance services, and in the latest SARS outbreak; (2) to discuss challenges and problems currently hindering the wide-scale adoption of GIS across the NHS; and (3) to identify the most important requirements and ingredients for addressing these challenges, and realising GIS potential within the NHS, guided by related initiatives worldwide. The ultimate goal is to illuminate the road towards implementing a comprehensive national, multi-agency spatio-temporal health information infrastructure functioning proactively in real time. The concepts and principles presented in this paper can be also applied in other countries, and on regional (e.g., European Union) and global levels.

While women experiencing intimate partner violence (IPV) face significant health consequences, their patterns of healthcare services (HCS) utilization are unclear, as are the effects of IPV screening and receiving information on these patterns.

Climate change is a major development challenge in sub-Saharan Africa. This region is highly vulnerable to negative impacts of climate change due to low adaptive capacity and overreliance on rain-fed agriculture for food security and livelihood. Climate information services (CIS) have been developed in Kenya to help enhance farmers' adaptation to climatic shocks, but their access and utilisation remain low. The factors that influence farmers' access and use of CIS are not well-known. Using survey data from a sample of 250 households in Makueni County, this study estimated a two-step Heckprobit model to analyse the determinants of access and use of CIS. Results showed that the age of the household head reduced the likelihood of accessing CIS whereas household size, income, farm size, livelihood activity, television ownership and group membership increased it. Age, sex of the household head, and frequent exposure to drought reduced the likelihood of using CIS whereas access to improved seed, household income, radio ownership, and livelihood activity increased it. Efforts promoting access to and utilisation of CIS would benefit by building trust among farmers through provision of accurate information; promoting adoption of improved varieties of crops; and providing incentives for formation and participation in farmers' groups.

The objective of this study was to assess the pharmacy professionals' understanding and viewpoints on drug information center (DIC) services and differences, if any, with pharmacologist's survey conducted earlier.