Studies in health technology and informatics
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Stud Health Technol Inform · Jan 2012
Challenges of the e-Health curricular education in bio-medical engineering and in medicine.
Curricular recommendations coming from highly respectable associations are highly useful. Nevertheless, they show fatigue in keeping the pace of any fast evolution, as in the ICT happens. So we do the attempt to disclose the emerging challenges affecting e-Health curricular education.
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Stud Health Technol Inform · Jan 2012
The use of linked registries to assess long-term mortality of ICU patients.
Clinical registries are frequently used to monitor and analyze the quality of health care by assessing the in-hospital mortality. However, long-term mortality is often ignored as it is rarely recorded in such clinical registries. In this study linkage of a clinical registry and administrative database is used to assess the longterm mortality of a large ICU sample. ⋯ In this study we have focused on the general ICU population, though linkage of clinical and administrative databases can also be used to perform analyses in specific diagnostic ICU populations or for non-ICU patients. In this study 71.4% of the clinical records could be linked with the administrative database. Future studies should focus on improving linkage of different registries.
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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.
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Stud Health Technol Inform · Jan 2012
Use of a virtual integrated environment in prosthetic limb development and phantom limb pain.
Patients face two major difficulties following limb loss: phantom limb pain (PLP) in the residual limb and limited functionality in the prosthetic limb. Many studies have focused on decreasing PLP with mirror therapy, yet few have examined the same visual ameliorating effect with a virtual or prosthetic limb. ⋯ Preliminary results show an overall reduction in PLP and a trend toward improvement in signal-to-motion accuracy over time. These signals allowed MPL users to perform a wide range of hand motions.
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Electronic Health Record (EHR) data has the potential to track patients' journeys through healthcare systems. Many of those journeys are supposed to follow Integrated Care Pathways (ICPs) built on evidence based guidelines. An ICP for a particular condition sets out "what should happen", whereas the EHR records "what did happen". ⋯ By performing variance analysis over multiple patients, patterns of deviation from idealised care are revealed. The use of ICP variance analysis, however, is not as widespread as it could be in healthcare quality improvement processes - we argue that this is due to the difficulty of combining the required specialist knowledge and skills from different disciplines. COCPIT (Collaborative Online Care Pathway Investigation Tool) was developed to overcome this difficulty and provides clinicians and health service managers with a web-based tool for Care Pathway Variance Analysis.