Studies in health technology and informatics
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Stud Health Technol Inform · Jan 2005
Comparative StudyTeaching intravenous cannulation to medical students: comparative analysis of two simulators and two traditional educational approaches.
This study examines the effectiveness of two virtual reality simulators when compared with traditional methods of teaching intravenous (IV) cannulation to third year medical students. Thirty-four third year medical students were divided into four groups and then trained to perform an IV cannulation using either CathSim, Virtual I. V., a plastic simulated arm or by practicing IV placement on each other. ⋯ Students trained on the Virtual I. V. showed significantly greater improvement over baseline when compared with the simulated arm group (p<.026). Both simulators provided at least equal training to traditional methods of teaching, a finding with implications for future training of this procedure to novices.
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Stud Health Technol Inform · Jan 2005
Tools for statistical analysis with missing data: application to a large medical database.
Missing data is a common feature of large data sets in general and medical data sets in particular. Depending on the goal of statistical analysis, various techniques can be used to tackle this problem. Imputation methods consist in substituting the missing values with plausible or predicted values so that the completed data can then be analysed with any chosen data mining procedure. ⋯ The control chart was established for the 3 imputation methods studied here, assuming a multivariate normal distribution of data. The use of this tool on a large medical database was then investigated. We show how the control chart can be used to assess the quality of the imputation process in the pre-processing step upstream of data mining procedures.
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Stud Health Technol Inform · Jan 2005
CAD generated mold for preoperative implant fabrication in cranioplasty.
Intraoperative fabrication of acrylic cranial implants may be difficult and will increase operation time. In addition forming implants directly on the defect, intracranial tissues are exposed to heat of polymerization and residual monomer, that occurs, when autopolymerizing methyl methacrylate is used intraoperatively. Furthermore the cosmetical result may be unacceptable. ⋯ We will present methods for preoperative fabrication of cranial implants for a cadaver specimen. Implants were fabricated using a Rapid prototyping (RP) models of the skull built by Fused Deposition Modeling (FDM). In addition a mold of the defect was generated by CAD techniques, that can serve as a template for implant design.
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Stud Health Technol Inform · Jan 2005
Quality labelling and certification of electronic health record systems.
The Danish Health IT strategy 2003-2007 demands implementation of Electronic Health Records (EHR) in all Hospitals based on common standards. The aim is to achieve integration and semantic interoperability between different EHR systems in order to support a better communication and coherence between the health care parties. ⋯ The Danish EHR Observatory, which has been monitoring the development of EHR in Denmark since 1998, have developed a methodology for Quality labelling and certification of EHR systems. The methodology for certification of EHR systems has been used to validate EHR systems from different vendors to document to which extent the systems are based on the national requirements for EHR.
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Stud Health Technol Inform · Jan 2005
Developing Online Communities with LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) - the IMIA OSNI and CHIRAD Experiences.
Many health informatics organisations do not seem to use, on a practical basis, for the benefit of their activities and interaction with their members, the very technologies that they often promote for use within healthcare environments. In particular, many organisations seem to be slow to take up the benefits of interactive web technologies. ⋯ The experience of moving to applications using LAMP architecture, in particular that of the Open Source Nursing Informatics (OSNI) Working Group of the Special Interest Group in Nursing Informatics of the International Medical Informatics Association (IMIA-NI), in using PostNuke, a FLOSS Content Management System (CMS) illustrates many of the benefits of such applications. The experiences of the authors in installing and maintaining a large number of websites using FLOSS CMS to develop dynamic, interactive websites that facilitate real engagement with the members of IMIA-NI OSNI, the IMIA Open Source Working Group, and the Centre for Health Informatics Research and Development (CHIRAD), as well as other organisations, is used as the basis for discussing the potential benefits that could be realised by others within the health informatics community.