ClinRefLink: implementation of infobutton-like functionality in a commercial clinical information system incorporating concepts from textual documents.

Clinical information systems offer an opportunity to provide clinicians with medical reference materials during clinical encounters when the information is most beneficial. Implementation of this "Infobutton" concept has been described by a number of institutions with locally developed clinical information systems and electronic medical records. This article describes the development of an infobutton-like application called ClinRefLink embedded within a commercial clinical information system. ClinRefLink is somewhat unique in that it offers clinicians the option to perform reference searches based on clinical entities identified within narrative documents. In the first 30 days after implementation, 1018 reference searches were performed. The characteristics of the clinicians and the clinical context of the search terms are described. These data support the value of clinical term extraction from narrative documents as a component of an infobutton system.