Method Inform Med
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This paper addresses the problem of decision-making in relation to the administration of noninvasive mechanical ventilation (NIMV) in intensive care units. ⋯ Data mining methods can be successfully applied to determine the most influential factors in the success/failure of NIMV and also to predict NIMV results in future patients. The results provided by classifiers can be improved by preprocessing the data with feature selection techniques.
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This article is part of the Focus Theme of Methods of Information in Medicine on "Big Data and Analytics in Healthcare". ⋯ It would be beneficial to apply simple decision rules obtained from the decision tree in an ad-hoc manner to guide the cohort stratification. It could be potentially beneficial to explore the effect of pairwise interactions between influential predictors when building the logistic regression models for different data strata. Judicious use of the ad-hoc CLR models developed offers insights into future development of prediction models for hospital readmissions, which can lead to better intuition in identifying high-risk patients and developing effective post-discharge care strategies. Lastly, this paper is expected to raise the awareness of collecting data on additional markers and developing necessary database infrastructure for larger-scale exploratory studies on readmission risk prediction.
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Clinical handovers at changes of shifts are typical scenarios of time restricted and information intensive communication, which are highly cognitively demanding. The currently available applications supporting handovers typically present complex information in a textual checklist-like manner. This presentation style has been criticised for not meeting the specific user requirements. ⋯ We propose cognitive maps to represent and visualise the clinical case in situations where there is limited time to present complex information.
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This study aimed to identify and analyze characteristics of highly cited articles published in the Web of Science category of health care sciences and services from 1958 to 2012. ⋯ The application of quantitative techniques in the analysis of highly cited articles can improve the researchers' understanding of the directions in health care sciences and services field. Y-index is useful for the evaluation of contributing authors.
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Using three risk-adjustment methods we evaluated whether co-morbidity derived from electronic hospital patient data provided significant improvement on age adjustment when predicting major outcomes following an elective total joint replacement (TJR) due to osteoarthritis. ⋯ The predictive performance of co-morbidity derived from electronic hospital data is outcome and risk-adjustment method specific.