Studies in health technology and informatics
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Stud Health Technol Inform · Jan 2015
Implementation of Data Drive Heart Rate and Respiratory Rate parameters on a Pediatric Acute Care Unit.
The majority of hospital physiologic monitor alarms are not clinically actionable and contribute to alarm fatigue. In 2014, The Joint Commission declared alarm safety as a National Patient Safety Goal and urged prompt action by hospitals to mitigate the issue [1]. It has been demonstrated that vital signs in hospitalized children are quite different from currently accepted reference ranges [2]. Implementation of data-driven, age stratified vital sign parameters (Table 1) for alarms in this patient population could reduce alarm frequency.
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Stud Health Technol Inform · Jan 2015
Health Informatics Competences for eHealth: What Can We Learn From a Bibliometric Analysis?
The appearance of eHealth adds a new dimension to health informatics competencies--they are not necessary just for health providers and health information system users and developers, but also for health consumers.
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Stud Health Technol Inform · Jan 2015
Clinical Informatics Board Specialty Certification for Physicians: A Global View.
Clinical informatics workforce development is a high priority for medicine. Professional board certification for physicians is an important tool to demonstrating excellence. The recent recognition of clinical informatics as a subspecialty board in the U. ⋯ Training and certification for non-physician informatics professionals in allied areas are widespread. Official recognition and certification for physicians and all informatics professionals represents a key component of capacity building and a means of addressing the shortage of a skilled informatics workforce. Wider adoption of certification programs may further attracting talent and accelerate growth of the field.
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Stud Health Technol Inform · Jan 2015
Automated Detection of Postoperative Surgical Site Infections Using Supervised Methods with Electronic Health Record Data.
The National Surgical Quality Improvement Project (NSQIP) is widely recognized as "the best in the nation" surgical quality improvement resource in the United States. In particular, it rigorously defines postoperative morbidity outcomes, including surgical adverse events occurring within 30 days of surgery. ⋯ As a prototype system, we combined local EHR data with the NSQIP gold standard outcomes and developed machine learned models to retrospectively detect Surgical Site Infections (SSI), a particular family of adverse events that NSQIP extracts. The built models have high specificity (from 0.788 to 0.988) as well as very high negative predictive values (>0.98), reliably eliminating the vast majority of patients without SSI, thereby significantly reducing the NSQIP extractors' burden.
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Stud Health Technol Inform · Jan 2015
The Role of Medical Transcriptionists in Producing High-Quality Documentation.
This study aimed to investigate the quality-assurance work conducted by medical transcriptionists in the production of medical records, and the implications of these findings when designing a structured electronic patient record (EPR) system in which physicians are supposed to write documentation themselves. Both qualitative and quantitative methods were applied. Qualitative data were collected through informal discussions and focus-group interviews. ⋯ Each medical transcriptionist performs an average of more than six corrections per day, and approximately one of three dictations are corrected. We suggest that these correction and quality-assurance tasks need to be compensated for when designing and developing new structured EPRs. Some quality-assurance tasks may also advantageously be performed by secretaries in the future.