Studies in health technology and informatics
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Apps running on mobile devices are continually gaining importance, for medical professionals as well as for patients. When used appropriately, they can support their users, have the potential to increase efficiency and to lower costs. However, the information available for "medical apps" that are currently being distributed in the official mobile app stores of different mobile platforms often rather raises than answers questions regarding important aspects such as functionality, limits, data integrity, security and privacy. In this paper, we analyze the current situation, including a basic overview over current reporting and regulatory mechanisms and propose the use of an app-synopsis as step in direction of transparency.
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Electronic health records (EHRs) are increasingly being used in health care systems, hospitals, and clinics throughout North America. Over the past several years emergency departments (ED) have increasingly become more computerized. ⋯ In this paper we outline the current state of the research in using mobile devices in the ED. Our findings suggest there is very little research evidence that supports the use of mobile devices in the ED and more research is needed to better understand and optimize their use.
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Stud Health Technol Inform · Jan 2013
ReviewIssues of data governance associated with data mining in medical research: experiences from an empirical study.
This chapter is a review of data mining techniques used in medical research. It will cover the existing applications of these techniques in the identification of diseases, and also present the authors' research experiences in medical disease diagnosis and analysis. A computational diagnosis approach can have a significant impact on accurate diagnosis and result in time and cost effective solutions. ⋯ Use of association learning, a well recognised data mining procedure, will also be discussed. Many of the datasets considered in existing medical data mining research are imbalanced, and the chapter focuses on this issue as well. Lastly, the chapter outlines the need of data governance in this research domain.
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Stud Health Technol Inform · Jan 2013
Disseminating context-specific access to online knowledge resources within electronic health record systems.
Clinicians' patient care information needs are frequent and largely unmet. Online knowledge resources are available that can help clinicians meet these information needs. Yet, significant barriers limit the use of these resources within the clinical workflow. ⋯ This paper describes OpenInfobutton (www.openinfobutton.org): a standards-based, open source Web service that was designed to disseminate infobutton capabilities in multiple EHR systems and healthcare organizations. OpenInfobutton has been successfully integrated with 38 knowledge resources at 5 large healthcare organizations in the United States. We describe the OpenInfobutton architecture, knowledge resource integration, and experiences at five large healthcare organizations.
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Smartphones have become increasingly popular among every segment of the population. Caregivers do not want to miss out on this evolution and express interest in using mobile devices to perform their everyday care. This tendency has been well understood by many software providers who have produced many medical applications for smartphones. ⋯ In this paper, we look to adopt a rigorous approach to acquire evidence about these concerns through a prospective study. In order to get this evidence, the study compares several input interfaces in the context of recording vital signs on mobile devices. We would like to discover not only which interface is the most efficient, but also which one is the least prone to errors.