Studies in health technology and informatics
-
Stud Health Technol Inform · Jan 2015
Development and evaluation of task-specific NLP framework in China.
Natural language processing (NLP) has been designed to convert narrative text into structured data. Although some general NLP architectures have been developed, a task-specific NLP framework to facilitate the effective use of data is still a challenge in lexical resource limited regions, such as China. ⋯ In this framework, a shared and evolving ontology mechanism was designed. The result has shown that such a free text driven platform will accelerate the NLP technology acceptance in China.
-
Stud Health Technol Inform · Jan 2015
Computationally Comparing and Analyzing All Published Scoring Systems for Diagnosis of Disseminated Intravascular Coagulation.
The clinical literature presents four different scoring systems (SS) for the diagnosis of disseminated intravascular coagulation (DIC) by four institutions: ISTH, JMHLW, JAAM and KSTH. In this study a Java program was written to retrieve medical records from the MIMIC-II database and apply the criteria of all four. ⋯ Furthermore, the average internal composition of each score was also quantified. All source code produced is available for download at https://github.com/fabkury/hedicim.
-
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.
-
Stud Health Technol Inform · Jan 2015
What are the Costs of Improving Access to Specialists through eConsultation? The Champlain BASE Experience.
Excessive wait times and poor access to care are among the most significant problems facing health care service delivery in Canada and beyond. We implemented the Champlain BASE eConsult service in the region of Ottawa, Canada to increase access to specialist care. We have collected ongoing utilization data and provider surveys over a three year period, providing a unique opportunity to explore the economic aspects of this multispecialty eConsult service. ⋯ This is one of the first studies to examine costs across a multispecialty eConsult service. We saw a marked decrease in the cost per eConsult over each annual period. Future research is needed to identify and examine similar outcomes that may lead to cost savings.
-
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.