J Med Syst
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Comparative Study
A comparative study on chronic obstructive pulmonary and pneumonia diseases diagnosis using neural networks and artificial immune system.
Millions of people are diagnosed every year with a chest disease in the world. Chronic obstructive pulmonary and pneumonia diseases are two of the most important chest diseases. And these are very common illnesses in Turkey. ⋯ Used neural network structures in this study were multilayer, probabilistic, and learning vector quantization neural networks. The results of the study were compared with the results of the pervious similar studies reported focusing on chronic obstructive pulmonary and pneumonia diseases diagnosis. The chronic obstructive pulmonary and pneumonia diseases dataset were prepared from a chest diseases hospital's database using patient's epicrisis reports.
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This study assessed the association between hospital ownership and technical efficiency in a managed care environment. Hospital technical efficiency scores were calculated via the data envelopment analysis (DEA) method, employing four input variables and three output variables from the American Hospital Association Hospital Survey Data for acute care general hospitals in Florida. ⋯ Another finding was that teaching hospitals were more efficient than non-teaching hospitals in 2001-2003, but not in 2004. Those variables associated with managed care, namely "number of HMO contracts" and "contracted with HMO", however, were not shown to be statistically significant.
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Fast developments in information and communication technology (ICT) have made it possible to develop new services for people. One of the most interesting areas is health care. Medical informatics is the discipline concerned with the systematic processing of data, information and knowledge in medicine and health care. ⋯ Telemedicine is the use of modern telecommunications and information technologies (IT) for the provision of clinical care to individuals at a distance and transmission of information to provide that care. In the present study, usage of IT in medicine, medical decision support systems, computerized medical measurements, patient education and network connectivity were described. A model for risk evaluation, data collection and education of undiagnosed diabetes using the world wide web (www) was presented.
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This paper explores the role of clinical decision support systems (CDSS) in facilitating communication between physicians, nurses, patients and family members. Thirty-three critical care unit nurses and physicians were interviewed regarding the APACHE III CDSS. ⋯ These forecasts are used to advocate for care decisions with other disciplines, patients and their family members. Implications for professional practice and recommendations for future research are described.
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Despite the considerable number of publications on ICU patient flow and analysis of its variability, a basic and practically important question remained unanswered: what maximum number of elective surgeries per day should be scheduled (along with the competing demand from emergency surgeries) in order to reduce diversion in an ICU with fixed bed capacity to an acceptable low level, or prevent it at all? The goal of this work was to develop a methodology to answer this question. An ICU patient flow simulation model was developed to establish a quantitative link between the daily load leveling of elective surgeries (elective schedule smoothing) and ICU diversion. ⋯ However this would require bumping 'extra' daily surgeries to the block time day of another week which could be up to 2 months apart. Because not all patients could wait that long for their elective surgery, another more practical scenario was tested that would also result in a very low ICU diversion: bumping 'extra' daily elective surgeries within less than 2 weeks apart, scheduling not more than five elective surgeries per day, and strict adherence to the ICU admission/ discharge criteria.