Studies in health technology and informatics
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Stud Health Technol Inform · Jan 2013
Tailored care management with patient-centered web-based portal in primary health care: sustaining a relational context.
While many innovative information and communication technologies have been offered as solutions to primary care management challenges, few have been shown to be effective and or sustainable over time. Information technology approaches have been narrow in focus, relying on designs that enhance usability, interoperability and adaptability by delimiting the traits, attributes, and characteristics of individual communication processes. It is increasingly understood in primary health care settings that relational communication continuity between the patient and the health care team is essential for optimizing co-determined treatments, interventions, and self-management strategies. Successful utilization of a patient-centered web-based portal must account for essential proximity of the relational aspect of care between the patient and the immediate health care team.
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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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Stud Health Technol Inform · Jan 2013
Randomized Controlled Trial Comparative StudyComparison of automated and manual vital sign collection at hospital wards.
Using a cross-over study design, vital signs were collected from 60 patients by 6 nurses. Each nurse was randomly assigned for manual vital sign collection in 5 patients and for automated data collection in other 5 patients. ⋯ We found that 30% of vital sign records were transmitted to EMR with at least one error after manual data collection whereas there wasno transmission error with automated data collection. Allparticipating nurses stated that the automated vital sign collection can improve their efficiency and save their time for direct patient care.
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Stud Health Technol Inform · Jan 2013
Multicenter StudyExamination of changes in pathology tests ordered by Diagnosis-Related Group (DRGs) following CPOE introduction.
Electronic test ordering, via the Electronic Medical Record (EMR), which incorporates computerised provider order entry (CPOE), is widely considered as a useful tool to support appropriate pathology test ordering. Diagnosis-related groups (DRGs) are clinically meaningful categories that allow comparisons in pathology utilisation by patient groups by controlling for many potentially confounding variables. This study used DRG data linked to pathology test data to examine changes in rates of test ordering across four years coinciding with the introduction of an EMR in six hospitals in New South Wales, Australia. ⋯ We investigated patients with a Chest pain DRG to examine whether tests rates changed for specific test groups by hospital emergency department (ED) pre- and post-EMR. There was little change in testing rates between EDs or between time periods pre- and post-EMR. This is a valuable method for monitoring the impact of EMR and clinical decision support on test order rates.
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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.