Studies in health technology and informatics
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Stud Health Technol Inform · Jan 2013
A domain-based approach for retrieving trustworthy health videos from YouTube.
Health information retrieval and YouTube can be used as powerful tools to improve user's health knowledge. However, YouTube videos must be carefully analysed in order to avoid misleading, inaccurate, obsolete and incorrect health content. ⋯ Video and channel metadata are used to automatically determine if a video is provided by a trusted source. The approach is tested and results show that the amount of relevant and reliable videos ranked within top-10 increase when using Domain-based ranking, compared with the original YouTube ranking.
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Stud Health Technol Inform · Jan 2013
Engineering natural language processing solutions for structured information from clinical text: extracting sentinel events from palliative care consult letters.
Despite a trend to formalize and codify medical information, natural language communications still play a prominent role in health care workflows, in particular when it comes to hand-overs between providers. Natural language processing (NLP) attempts to bridge the gap between informal, natural language information and coded, machine-interpretable data. This paper reports on a study that applies an advanced NLP method for the extraction of sentinel events in palliative care consult letters. ⋯ A random selection of 215 anonymized consult letters was used for the study. The results of the NLP extraction were evaluated by comparison with coded sentinel event data captured independently by clinicians. The average accuracy of the automated extraction was 73.6%.
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Handheld technology finds slowly its place in the healthcare world. Some clinicians already use intensively dedicated mobile applications to consult clinical references. However, handheld technology hasn't still broadly embraced to the core of the healthcare business, the hospitals. ⋯ To answer these questions, we have set up a field study to compare users' performances on three different user interfaces while recording vital signs. Some user interfaces were familiar to users, and others were totally innovative. Results showed that users' familiarity with smartphone influences their performances and that users improve their performances by repeating a task.
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Stud Health Technol Inform · Jan 2013
Tailored care management with patient-centered web-based portal in primary health care: sustaining a relational context.
While many innovative information and communication technologies have been offered as solutions to primary care management challenges, few have been shown to be effective and or sustainable over time. Information technology approaches have been narrow in focus, relying on designs that enhance usability, interoperability and adaptability by delimiting the traits, attributes, and characteristics of individual communication processes. It is increasingly understood in primary health care settings that relational communication continuity between the patient and the health care team is essential for optimizing co-determined treatments, interventions, and self-management strategies. Successful utilization of a patient-centered web-based portal must account for essential proximity of the relational aspect of care between the patient and the immediate health care team.
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Apps running on mobile devices are continually gaining importance, for medical professionals as well as for patients. When used appropriately, they can support their users, have the potential to increase efficiency and to lower costs. However, the information available for "medical apps" that are currently being distributed in the official mobile app stores of different mobile platforms often rather raises than answers questions regarding important aspects such as functionality, limits, data integrity, security and privacy. In this paper, we analyze the current situation, including a basic overview over current reporting and regulatory mechanisms and propose the use of an app-synopsis as step in direction of transparency.