Studies in health technology and informatics
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Stud Health Technol Inform · Jun 2020
Leveraging PubMed to Create a Specialty-Based Sense Inventory for Spanish Acronym Resolution.
Acronyms frequently occur in clinical text, which makes their identification, disambiguation and resolution an important task in clinical natural language processing. This paper contributes to acronym resolution in Spanish through the creation of a set of sense inventories organized by clinical specialty containing acronyms, their expansions, and corpus-driven features. The new acronym resource is composed of 51 clinical specialties with 3,603 acronyms in total, from which we identified 228 language independent acronyms and 391 language dependent expansions. We further analyzed the sense inventory across specialties and present novel insights of acronym usage in biomedical Spanish texts.
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Stud Health Technol Inform · Jun 2020
Feasibility of Using EN 13606 Clinical Archetypes for Defining Computable Phenotypes.
Computable phenotypes are gaining importance as structured and reproducible method of using electronic health data to identify people with certain clinical conditions. A formal standard is not available for defining and formally representing phenotyping algorithms. In this paper, we have tried to build a formal representation of such phenotyping algorithm. ⋯ The EN13606 archetypes can be used to define the phenotype algorithm that basically identifies patients by a set of clinical characteristics in their records. Phenotype representations defined in EN 13606 do not satisfy all the desiderata proposed by Mo et al. and thus currently has a limited ability to define the computable phenotyping algorithms. Further work is required to make the EN13606 standard to fully support the objective.
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Stud Health Technol Inform · Jun 2020
Health Professionals' Experiences of the Benefits and Challenges of Online Symptom Checkers.
Online symptom checkers and assessment services are used by patients seeking guidance on health problems. In this study, the goal was to identify health professionals' experiences of the benefits and challenges of new symptom checkers providing triage advice. Data was collected through an online survey of 61 health professionals who were target users of the online symptom checkers implemented in six public health organizations and one private occupational health clinic. ⋯ Health professionals were satisfied with symptom checkers providing them with more useful information before meeting patients. By contrast, symptom checkers were seen as disrupting clinical work and time-consuming. The results imply that the clinical work processes should be redesigned to guide patients in an efficient manner, avoid work overlap, and provide work motivation for professionals.
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Stud Health Technol Inform · Jun 2020
Development of a Mobile Digital Manikin to Measure Pain Location and Intensity.
Painful conditions are prevalent and substantially contribute to disability worldwide. Digital manikins are body-shaped drawings to facilitate self-reporting of pain. Some of them have been validated, but without allowing for recording of location-specific pain intensity and for use on a smartphone. ⋯ Test-retest reliability depended on the manikin's level of detail, but was generally high with most intraclass correlation coefficients âĽě0.70 and all similarity coefficients âĽě0.50. Participants found the manikin easy to use, but suggested clearer orientation (front/back, certain body locations) and would value additional feedback and diary functions. We will address these issues in the next version of the manikin before conducting a validation study.
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Research projects with humans is a highly regulated field that is currently undergoing rapid changes due to developments in eHealth and mHealth. While a patients data and samples must be thoroughly protected, they are also an invaluable source for fundamental and cutting edge research. There are processes in place to obtain a patient's consent for the use of their data and samples for research. ⋯ An Android app has been developed that brings any existing consent form to mobile devices, including the integration of the process into existing hospital IT using established data standards, such as FHIR and the ResearchStack open source framework. The app is user-tested and shown to work in a hospital setting. Lack of eIdentification and legal drawbacks were determined as the main obstacles for immediate implementation.