Jessica Ancker, Ph.D., MPH, FACMI, wins best paper award at the AMIA Annual Symposium

Dr. Ancker has received the prestigious Homer R. Warner Award from the American Medical Informatics Association. Her paper, which was written in collaboration with the Institute for Family Health and funded by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, was a retrospective cohort study examining patient use of an online medical encyclopedia linked to a personal health record.

The Home R. Warner Award is an influential award in the field of medical informatics. It is given to the author of the paper that best describes approaches to improving computerized information acquisition, knowledge data acquisition and management, and experimental results documenting the value of these approaches.

Her research found that patients in traditionally disadvantaged groups — specifically racial minorities and Medicaid patients — were actually more likely to use this online medical encyclopedia than other patients.

Dr. Ancker's paper, "Expanding access to high-quality plain-language patient education information through context-specific hyperlinks," suggests that the encyclopedia is potentially being used by lower literacy patients to supplement their understanding of their medical records. Elizabeth Mauer, one of Healthcare Policy & Research's research biostatisticians, is second author.

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