Howard Strasberg

Howard Strasberg MD MS

Vice President, Medical Informatics
Wolters Kluwer Health – Clinical Solutions

As the VP of Medical Informatics for Wolters Kluwer Health – Clinical Solutions, Howard focuses on building products that answer clinical questions and integrate knowledge with electronic medical record (EMR) and computerized physician order entry (CPOE) systems. He is also actively involved in standards development as a co-chair of the Health Level Seven (HL7) Clinical Decision Support (CDS) Technical Committee, which develops CDS standards in areas such as Infobuttons, order sets, and decision support services.

Prior to joining Wolters Kluwer Health in 2003, he was CEO of Skolar, Inc., an online provider of clinical information and "in context" continuing medical education (CME) for medical professionals.

Howard received his MD degree from the University of Western Ontario and his MS degree in Medical Information Sciences from Stanford University. He is board certified in Family Medicine. As a hobby, he enjoys following the airline industry, especially with regards to the latest schedules, routes, fares and frequent flyer programs.


Posts by Howard Strasberg

Enhancing Alerts with Lab Data: Surprise Findings

Written on May 15, 2013

In medication safety screening, alert fatigue occurs when the signal:noise ratio is so low that clinicians develop a habit of ignoring alerts, thereby potentially missing important alerts when they occur. One idea for reducing alert fatigue is to display relevant and recent lab results alongside the alert, thereby allowing physicians to make a more informed decision of the risk of a particular drug-drug interaction in a given patient. For example, if a drug-drug interaction may cause an increase in serum potassium (hyperkalemia), and if a patient’s serum potassium is already on the high side of normal, a physician may determine that it’s too risky to continue with the prescribed drug combination in this particular patient. Read further >


Mining for Drug Information

Written on April 08, 2013

In a typical electronic health record (EHR), patient data are entered and stored using some combination of structured data (e.g. diagnosis codes) and free text. In general, analyses of EHR data focus on the structured data portion, which can be leveraged more easily by standard query tools, and which avoids some of the problems with free text, such as ambiguous terms and negation. Still, there’s a lot of useful information buried in the free text portions of these records. If there were some way to mine the free text, gold might well be discovered. Read further >


Infobuttons for 2013

Written on January 24, 2013

Regular readers of this blog will know that I frequently comment on the Health Level Seven International (HL7) Infobutton standard. Infobuttons are context-sensitive links from electronic health records (EHRs) to knowledge resources. Infobuttons were included in the 2014 EHR certification criteria (United States) under both clinical decision support (CDS) and patient education. Read further >


Health eDecisions: A New Standard?

Written on December 17, 2012

The medical informatics community has been trying to create a widely adopted standard for clinical decision support (CDS) artifacts for decades. While various standards do exist (e.g. Arden Syntax and GELLO), they haven’t been widely adopted. Perhaps the existing standard of greatest prominence is the Arden Syntax, which was the result of an informatics retreat in 1989 at the Arden Homestead in Harriman, NY. The Arden Syntax became an ASTM standard in 1992 and a Health Level Seven (HL7) standard in 1999. It has been adopted by a few of the major electronic medical record (EMR) vendors, but certainly not by all of them. Moreover, Arden suffers from what is known as the curly braces problem. The institution-specific portion of data retrieval is contained within curly braces, so institutions have to modify the content of the curly braces in order to be able to use Arden rules from external sources. Read further >


Exploring content, technology, & new ideas in the global information industry. New posts every Monday, Wednesday, Friday, & sometimes more. Visit us also at www.wolterskluwer.com
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