J Med Syst
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To develop a system for checking indication and contraindication of medicines in prescription order entry system, a master table consisting of the disease names corresponding to the medicines adopted in a hospital is needed. The creation of this table requires a considerable manpower. We developed a Web-based system for constructing a medicine/disease thesaurus and a knowledge base. ⋯ When a disease name or medicine name was added to the thesaurus, the check table was automatically updated. We constructed a thesaurus and a knowledge base in the field of circulatory system disease. The knowledge base linked with the thesaurus proved to be efficient for making the check master table for indication/contraindication of medicines.
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Listening to various lung sounds has proven to be an important diagnostic tool for detecting and monitoring certain types of lung diseases. In this study a computer-based system has been designed for easy measurement and analysis of lung sound using the software package DasyLAB. The designed system presents the following features: it is able to digitally record the lung sounds which are captured with an electronic stethoscope plugged to a sound card on a portable computer, display the lung sound waveform for auscultation sites, record the lung sound into the ASCII format, acoustically reproduce the lung sound, edit and print the sound waveforms, display its time-expanded waveform, compute the Fast Fourier Transform (FFT), and display the power spectrum and spectrogram.
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This paper utilizes the diffusion of innovation framework to discuss factors affecting adoption of telemedicine. Empirical and anecdotal findings are organized across five attributes affecting innovation adoption rates for the following four adopter groups: physicians, patients, hospital administrators, and payers. A discussion of the implications is included.
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Comparative Study
Trends of mortality rates during the last thirty years in Greece.
General mortality rates and specific mortality rates by major causes of death (coronary disease, cancer, tuberculosis, traffic accidents, suicide, vascular disorders of central neural system) in Greece have been studied throughout the 30-year period 1967--1996 and time trends have being calculated by nonlinear models of trend analysis. The results confirm the general pattern of decrease of mortality in Greece during the particular period of time as a result of the combination of the impact of two controversial trends: on one hand the decrease of infant mortality and mortality from infectious disorders and on the other the relatively slower and more gradual increase in mortality rates by disorders related to the western lifestyle culture, such as cardiovascular disorders and cancer. During the period under study in Greece the impact of the second trend seems to inflict less severe implication in the formulation of the pattern of general mortality especially as women are concerned. This statistically significant and gradually increasing difference in mortality between men and women in Greece has been confirmed in general mortality time trends as well as in the evaluation of the relatively better pattern of mortality trends of women from particular "western lifestyle" disorders.
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Multicenter Study
Measuring patient satisfaction of the quality of health care: a study of hospitals in Turkey.
Patient satisfaction is an important measure of service quality in health care systems. Patients' perceptions about health care systems seem to have been largely ignored by health care managers in developing countries. ⋯ Factor analysis was utilized to determine the factor structure. The instrument of the patient satisfaction developed in this study provides insights to the researches who study the improvement of patient satisfaction with service quality of hospitals, practitioners, and the decision makers.