Adoption of electronic medical records (EMRs) has been spotty and sluggish in the world, including the United States, despite the multiple benefits of medical technology and informatics. Though there are difficulties in establishing and maintaining an EMR system in a developing country, it is not impossible. The International Classification of Diseases (ICD) Logger, called CREDO (Clinical Rotation Evaluation and Documentation Organizer), developed by Edward Via College of Osteopathic Medicine (VCOM), provides a straightforward, economical EMR system to use in a developing country, such as Ghana. However, with a recently established EMR system developed locally and being used at the target new hospital, Healthwise Medical Center, the aim of the study was to use the common medical documentation language of the World Health Organization (WHO) ICD-10 codes to add value to the local EMR. This demonstration enabled the comparison of medical encounters in Ghana to those in the United States, specifically in Appalachia where VCOM students typically do their clinical rotations. We also evaluated the issues and tested the CREDO ICD Logger as a simple, stand-alone EMR system. Therefore, by collecting ICD data twice weekly from Ghana, a data point in Sub-Saharan Africa, it became possible to compare a public health snapshot of developing countries and sites in the United States.

Background Scientists communicate progress and exchange information via publication and presentation at scientific meetings. We previously showed that text similarity analysis applied to Medline can identify and quantify plagiarism and duplicate publications in peer-reviewed biomedical journals. In the present study, we applied the same analysis to a large sample of conference abstracts. Methods We downloaded 144,149 abstracts from 207 national and international meetings of 63 biomedical conferences. Pairwise comparisons were made using eTBLAST: a text similarity engine. A domain expert then reviewed random samples of highly similar abstracts (1500 total) to estimate the extent of text overlap and possible plagiarism. Results Our main findings indicate that the vast majority of textual overlap occurred within the same meeting (2%) and between meetings of the same conference (3%), both of which were significantly higher than instances of plagiarism, which occurred in less than .5% of abstracts. Conclusions This analysis indicates that textual overlap in abstracts of papers presented at scientific meetings is one-tenth that of peer-reviewed publications, yet the plagiarism rate is approximately the same as previously measured in peer-reviewed publications. This latter finding underscores a need for monitoring scientific meeting submissions – as is now done when submitting manuscripts to peer-reviewed journals – to improve the integrity of scientific communications.

At the Edward Via College of Osteopathic Medicine (VCOM), students are taught through a systems-based block education process organized according to separate organ systems. The block education lectures provide instruction on these various organ systems and their associated diseases and potential for diagnosis and treatment. A curricular initiative implemented at VCOM incorporates International Classification of Diseases, 10th Revision (ICD-10) codes into the preclinical curriculum to enhance student learning and recall of basic science information and to prepare them for patient encounters during clinical rotations. In constructing this curricular initiative, diseases and procedures mentioned in all lectures during the first 2 years were evaluated and matched with their corresponding ICD-10 diagnostic and procedural codes to illustrate to students how this information would be used in a clinical setting. Of 994 lectures with 36,105 slides, 4331 opportunities to associate ICD-10 codes were identified. Information was given to instructors to update their future lectures. This initiative aims to enhance the preclinical educational experience and prepare preclinical students for documenting patient care. After students have been fully exposed to this new learning component, a study is planned to analyze the effects of the curriculum.