Studies in health technology and informatics
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Stud Health Technol Inform · Jan 2012
Early discharge and its effect on ED length of stay and access block.
Effecting early discharge is a widely recommended strategy for improving patient flow in acute hospitals. This paper analyses the impact of inpatient discharge timing on Emergency Department (ED) flow parameters such as access block and length of stay, while comparing this to the effect on hospital occupancy, to arrive at an understanding of a 'whole of hospital' response to discharge timing. ⋯ The analysis reveals that, on days when the discharge peak lags the peak in inpatient admissions, hospitals of all sizes exhibit increased levels of occupancy, inpatient and ED length of stay, and access block. The findings corroborate the efficacy of early discharge initiatives and 'whole of hospital' flow improvement initiatives for addressing overcrowding and efficiency issues in hospitals.
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Stud Health Technol Inform · Jan 2012
Clinical TrialIntraoperative Neurophysiologic Monitoring (INM) in scoliosis surgery.
Even among skilled spinal deformity surgeons, neurologic deficits are inherent potential complications of spine surgery. The aim was to assess the meaning of changes and to evaluate the critical rates of Somatosensory Evoked Potentials (SEP) and Motor Evoked Potentials (MEP) for Neurologic Deficit (ND) occurrence associated with scoliosis surgery. A Group of 30 patients with idiopathic scoliosis treated surgically by posterior correction and stabilisation were included. ⋯ There was no correlation between flexibility and correction of the curve and SEP and MEP decrease. The safe level for MEP was not determined but its meaning for the outcome was more important than SEP value. The need of (INM) during scoliosis surgery to avoid (ND) was confirmed.
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Stud Health Technol Inform · Jan 2012
Personalised mobile health and fitness apps: lessons learned from myFitnessCompanion®.
Smartphones and tablets are slowly but steadily changing the way we look after our health and fitness. Today, many high quality mobile apps are available for users and health professionals and cover the whole health care chain, i.e. information collection, prevention, diagnosis, treatment and monitoring. Our team has developed a mobile health and fitness app called myFitnessCompanion® which has been available via Android market since February 2011. ⋯ We discuss the acceptance of health apps by end-users and healthcare industry. We discuss how mobile health apps will be distributed in the near future, the use of Personal Health Record (PHR) systems such as Microsoft HealthVault and the impact of regulations (FDA) on the future of mobile health apps. The paper is based on seven years of experience by the authors as mobile health and fitness application developers and we discuss the challenges and opportunities for app developers in the health industry.
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Stud Health Technol Inform · Jan 2012
Virtual medical record implementation for enhancing clinical decision support.
Development of clinical decision support systems (CDS) is a process which highly depends on the local databases, this resulting in low interoperability. To increase the interoperability of CDS a standard representation of clinical information is needed. ⋯ Beside the implementation of the vMR, the architecture integrates: a Data Manager, an interface, a decision making system (based on Egadss), a retrieving data module. Conclusions are issued.
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Stud Health Technol Inform · Jan 2012
Implementation of Computerized Physician Order Entry (CPOE) with Clinical Decision Support (CDS) features in Riyadh Hospitals to improve quality of information.
In this paper, we have conducted a preliminary study of the applied Clinical Decision Support (CDS) features in adopted Computerized Physician Order Entry (CPOE) systems. The study was conducted in three hospitals in Riyadh, the capital city of Saudi Arabia. ⋯ CPOE systems allow physicians to enter their medication orders electronically, but many of the applied CPOE systems do not contain alerts to advise physicians of potentially dangerous interactions caused by incorrect medications. Hospitals are advised to enhance the role of CDSS with the CPOE to reduce medication errors, improve patients' safety and increase information quality.