Method Inform Med
-
Healthcare professionals in hospital care increasingly use small-screen handheld computers. Studies that have investigated doctors' concerns about handheld usage have mainly focused on technical, organizational and performance issues. Very few have looked at the effects of Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs) on the interaction between physician and patient. ⋯ Despite the many benefits, PDA usage at the point-of-care comes with the increased risk of distractions for physicians and can cause a negative patient experience. Designers of point-of-care systems need to be aware of, and address, the problems with handhelds and learn from the attributes and access capabilities of paper charts.
-
To investigate the effects of hypoxia during sleep on linear and self-similar components of heart rate variability (HRV) in eight healthy subjects at high altitude on Mount Everest. ⋯ While the biological interpretation of these results is still in progress, our data indicates that the cardiac response to high altitude hypoxia during sleep can hardly be fully explored by traditional HRV estimators only, and requires the additional support of more sophisticated indexes exploring also nonlinear and fractal features of cardiac variability.
-
Accurate and early diagnosis of various diseases and pathological conditions require analysis techniques that can capture time-varying (TV) dynamics. In the pursuit of promising TV signal processing methods applicable to real-time clinical monitoring applications, nonstationary spectral techniques are of great significance. ⋯ Integration of such robust algorithms into pulse oximeter device may have significant impact in real-time clinical monitoring and point-of-care healthcare settings.
-
1) To measure the incidence and impact of missed radiology and microbiology test results in an emergency department with an electronic test order and results viewing system, and 2) to assess the average times from test order to test availability. ⋯ Our rates of missed test results are lower than those reported from studies where paper ordering and reporting systems were used. This suggests that the availability of CPOE systems may reduce the risk of these events. Electronic result delivery, with electronic endorsement to allow documentation of follow-up of test results, may provide additional efficiency benefits and further reduce the risk of test results which are not followed up.