Studies in health technology and informatics
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Stud Health Technol Inform · Jan 2015
ECHO Ontario Chronic Pain & Opioid Stewardship: Providing Access and Building Capacity for Primary Care Providers in Underserviced, Rural, and Remote Communities.
Chronic pain is a prevalent and serious problem in the province of Ontario. Frontline primary care providers (PCPs) manage the majority of chronic pain patients, yet receive minimal training in chronic pain. ECHO (Extension for Community Healthcare Outcomes) Ontario Chronic Pain & Opioid Stewardship aims to address the problem of chronic pain management in Ontario. ⋯ We discuss how ECHO increases PCP access and capacity to manage chronic pain, the development of a community of practice, as well as the limitations of our approach. The ECHO model is a promising approach for healthcare system improvement. ECHO's strength lies in its simplicity, adaptability, and use of existing telemedicine infrastructure to increase both access and capacity of PCPs in underserviced, rural, and remote communities.
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Stud Health Technol Inform · Jan 2015
Clinical Decision Support Based on Integrated Patient Models: A Vision.
Clinical decision making is non-trivial given the amounts of data and knowledge that needs to be considered. So far, medical knowledge, biological knowledge and patient data are separated from each other and need to be integrated mentally by a physician to form an overarching patient model. In this paper, we describe a vision for future decision support systems that link knowledge about organ functions, biological processes, treatment decisions and clinical data represented in repsective models. Requirements and challenges for realizing this vision will be collected.
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Stud Health Technol Inform · Jan 2015
New technologies applied to surgical processes: Virtual Reality and rapid prototyping.
AYRA is software of virtual reality for training, planning and optimizing surgical procedures. AYRA was developed under a research, development and innovation project financed by the Andalusian Ministry of Health, called VirSSPA. ⋯ They are used for surgical planning support, intraoperative reference or defect reconstruction. In this paper, some of these tools and some real cases are presented.
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Stud Health Technol Inform · Jan 2015
H2020 EU Research & Innovation Program Boost the Transfer of Technological Breakthroughs, Enable New Solutions for Personalised Health and Impact the Industry and Healthcare Systems.
Our Healthcare systems worldwide are facing grand challenges that can be addressed by intelligent, miniaturized and interconnected devices. Many of today's pharmaceutical drugs create bigger problems than solutions, as drugs help only 40% of the patients and kill, in the USA alone, over 100,000 people per year. The widespread use of antibiotics has led to new strands of bacteria that defy all known antibiotics and kill well over 100,000 people yearly in the world. ⋯ Therefore the EU has developed the Horizon 2020 program as a framework for technology development and new business creation. Horizon 2020 is focusing on support for technology transfer, and on building ecosystems and value chains to ensure shorter times-to-market, thus enabling a higher impact of knowledge-based technologies. This paper will argue the necessity of developing these new class of devices, discuss its state-of-the-art, and the challenges for the implementation of Horizon 2020 and the new opportunities in intelligent miniaturized systems for pHealth.
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Integrated care concepts can help to diminish demographic challenges. Hereof, the use of eHealth, esp. overarching electronic health records, is recognized as an efficient approach. The article aims at rigorously defining the concept of lifetime electronic health records (LEHRs) and the identification of core factors that need to be fulfilled in order to implement such. ⋯ The analysis revealed, that culture, regulation, informational self-determination, incentives, compliance, ICT infrastructure and standards are important preconditions to successfully implement LEHRs. The article paves the way for LEHR implementation and therewith for integrated care. Besides the expected benefits of LEHRs, there are a number of ethical, legal and social concerns, which need to be balanced.