Foundations of Biomedical and Health Informatics Flashcards

Friedman's 'fundamental theorem' of biomedical informatics states that:

Answer: A person working with an information resource is better than that same person unassisted

Friedman (2009) framed informatics as augmenting people, so person plus resource should outperform the person alone.

In the DIKW hierarchy, a serum potassium value of 6.2 mmol/L flagged as 'high' for a specific patient best represents:

Answer: Information

A raw value given context and meaning (high for this patient) is information.

Which subdiscipline of biomedical informatics focuses primarily on the molecular and cellular level, such as genomic sequence analysis?

Answer: Bioinformatics

Bioinformatics sits at the molecular/cellular end of the informatics application spectrum.

Sittig and Singh's sociotechnical model for health IT includes how many interrelated dimensions?

Answer: Eight

The model has eight dimensions, including hardware/software, clinical content, human-computer interface, people, workflow, organization, external rules, and measurement/monitoring.

A test has 90% sensitivity and 80% specificity. In a population with very low disease prevalence, which statement is most accurate?

Answer: The positive predictive value will be low

At low prevalence, false positives outnumber true positives, so PPV drops while sensitivity and specificity stay constant.

Which early system, developed at Stanford in the 1970s, used rule-based reasoning with certainty factors to recommend antibiotic therapy?

Answer: MYCIN

MYCIN was a landmark rule-based expert system for diagnosing bacterial infections and choosing antibiotics.

Shannon's information theory measures information content primarily in terms of:

Answer: Reduction of uncertainty

Shannon defined information as the reduction in uncertainty (entropy), independent of meaning.