Studies in health technology and informatics
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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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The last six years the global community is facing an economic crisis that first appeared in USA. This crisis has a lot of impacts especially in health sector. Unemployment, job insecurity and the loss of disposable income have a significant impact in health too. ⋯ To collect the data it has been used the Greek version of Short Form (36) Health Survey (SF-36v2). In general, income, level of education, cohabitation and parenthood had a significant impact in quality of life. As a conclusion, unemployed participants' score was lower in the entire dimensions and in the two summary scales too.
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Stud Health Technol Inform · Jan 2015
Multicenter StudyThe Role of Hospital Information Systems in Universal Health Coverage Monitoring in Rwanda.
In this retrospective study, the authors monitored the patient health coverage in 6 Rwandan hospitals in the period between 2011 and 2014. Among the 6 hospitals, 2 are third level hospitals, 2 district hospitals and 2 private hospitals. Patient insurance and financial data were extracted and analyzed from OpenClinic GA, an open source hospital information system (HIS) used in those 6 hospitals. ⋯ The amounts paid by the patients for health services decreased in private hospitals to 25% of the total costs in 2014 (-7.4%) and vary between 14% and 19% in public hospitals. Although the number of insured patients has increased and the patient share decreased over the four years of study, the patients' out-of-pocket payments increased especially for in-patients. This study emphasizes the value of integrated hospital information systems for this kind of health economics research in developing countries.
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Stud Health Technol Inform · Jan 2015
Design and development of an EMR for Ebola Treatment Centers in Sierra Leone using OpenMRS.
Ebola treatment presents unique challenges for medical records because strict infection control requirements rule out most conventional record-keeping systems. We used the OpenMRS platform to rapidly develop an EMR system for the recently opened Kerry Town, Sierra Leone Ebola Treatment Centre. This system addresses the need for recording patient data and communicating it between the infectious and non-infectious zones, and is specifically designed for maximum usability by staff wearing cumbersome protective equipment. This platform is interoperable with other key eHealth systems in the country, and is extensible to other sites and diseases.
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The hearing healthcare scenario is rapidly evolving due to the pervasive use of m-Health solutions, in particular mobile apps. This brings along significant advantages and opportunities (e.g., accessibility, affordability, personalized healthcare, patient empowerment) as well as significant potential risks and threats (e.g., safety, misuse, quality issues, privacy). Our research aims at the identification and assessment of apps in the hearing healthcare domain. In this article we present an overview of the current availability, variety, and penetration of hearing-related apps.