Studies in health technology and informatics
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Stud Health Technol Inform · Jan 2008
Repeated palpatory training of medical students on the Virtual Haptic Back.
The effectiveness of simulation-based training has been accepted with great success in many fields including medicine. Most of the simulation research and development in medicine has focused on surgery. ⋯ The Virtual Haptic Back (VHB) is a simulator based on virtual reality and haptics that is currently being used to train medical students in palpatory diagnosis. This study examined the effect of repeating the training on the VHB.
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Australia is a large country with a small and scattered population. Specialist dermatology services are concentrated in the capital cities and larger urban centers on the coast. This has meant access to these services for Australians in rural and remote areas has been limited to those able to travel the often long distances to their nearest dermatologist. ⋯ In any event Tele-Derm is not trying to provide a service that is necessarily better then the traditional mode of delivery. It wishes to provide a service where none currently exists. To this end, Tele-Derm provides teleconsultation and online education in dermatology to doctors Australia wide.
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Stud Health Technol Inform · Jan 2008
Telemedicine in extreme conditions: disasters, war, remote sites.
Telemedicine has developed around certain assumptions about connectivity and format. From the pioneer work of Kenneth Bird in the 1970's medical events separated by distance were connected for videoconference interaction [1]. The connection implied well developed telecommunications tools at both ends of the interaction. ⋯ New solutions can meet the expectation of being wherever services are need whenever the need arises. This chapter looks at the experiences, successes and failures of telemedicine in natural disaster, war, and extreme remote sites. The presentation is concluded with recommendations to make telemedicine integral to any disaster response and a natural tool for any human endeavor that requires sending people to remote and hostile environments.
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Stud Health Technol Inform · Jan 2008
Using ESB and BPEL for evolving healthcare systems towards SOA.
Healthcare organizations often face the challenge of integrating diverse and geographically disparate information technology systems to respond to changing requirements and to exploit the capabilities of modern technologies. Hence, systems evolution, through modification and extension of the existing information technology infrastructure, becomes a necessity. This paper takes a process perspective of healthcare delivery within and across organizational boundaries and the presents a disciplined approach for evolving healthcare systems towards a service-oriented architecture using the enterprise system bus middleware technology for resolving integration issues and the business process execution language for supporting collaboration requirements.
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Stud Health Technol Inform · Jan 2008
Intensive care telemedicine: evaluating a model for proactive remote monitoring and intervention in the critical care setting.
Historically, telemedicine has focused on the application of traditional physician-to-patient (and physician-to-physician) interactions enhanced by two-way video and audio capability. This "one-on-one" interaction via a telemedicine link can dramatically extend a physician's or other caregiver's geographic range and availability. However, this same telemedicine model is most often implemented "on-demand" for a specified time-limited encounter. ⋯ Multiple challenges remain before remote ICU systems become more broadly accepted and applied. These include cost of implementation of the system, resistance to the system by ICU physicians and nurses, and integration of data systems and clinical information into the remote electronic ICU model. In this chapter, we will provide background information on error reduction theory and the role of the remote ICU model, review current data supporting use of the remote ICU system, address the current obstacles to effective implementation, and look to the future of the field for solutions to these challenges.