Studies in health technology and informatics
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Stud Health Technol Inform · Jan 1997
ReviewTeaching and assessing clinical skills using virtual reality.
The need to improve the teaching and assessing of students' procedural skills has been well 0 encounters, often with little or no supervision. Assessment of these skills has depended on rudimentary physical models, or standardized patients. The limitations of these methods also are well known. ⋯ Many variations in anatomy or other complications can be presented, and trainees can practice hundreds of times until their skills are perfected. This paper describes current activities in this area in the Dalhousie Faculty of Medicine and elsewhere. Various forms of Virtual Reality are described and their application to particular clinical areas are described.
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The problem of defining a quality model to be used in the evaluation of the software components of a Health Care System (HCS) is addressed. The model, based on the ISO/IEC 9126 standard, has been interpreted to fit the requirements of some classes of applications representative of Health Care Systems, on the basis of the experience gained both in the field of medical Informatics and assessment of software products. The values resulting from weighing the quality characteristics according to their criticality outline a set of quality profiles that can be used both for evaluation and certification.
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Stud Health Technol Inform · Jan 1997
Clinical-HINTS: integrated intelligent ICU patient monitoring and information management system.
Clinical-HINTS (Health Intelligence System) is a horizontally integrated decision support system (DSS) designed to meet the requirements for intelligent real-time clinical information management in critical care medical environments and to lay the foundation for the development of the next generation of intelligent medical instrumentation. The system presented was developed to refine and complement the information yielded by clinical laboratory investigations, thereby benefiting the management of the intensive care unit (ICU) patient. More specifically, Clinical-HINTS was developed to provide computer-based assistance with the acquisition, organisation and display, storage and retrieval, communication and generation of real-time patient-specific clinical information in an ICU. ⋯ Current generic reasoning skills include perception and reactive cognition of patient status but exclude therapeutic action. The system monitors the patient by communicating with the available sources of data and uses generic reasoning skills to generate intelligent alarms, or HINTS, on various levels of interpretation of an observed dysfunction, even in the presence of complex disorders. The system's communication and information management capabilities are used to acquire physiological data, and to store them along with their interpretations and any interventions for the dynamic recognition of interrelated pathophysiological states or clinical events.