Studies in health technology and informatics
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Stud Health Technol Inform · Jan 2010
Comparative StudyKey common determinants for adoption of wireless technology in healthcare for India and Pakistan: development of a conceptual model.
This study explores the perception and views of healthcare professionals in the subcontinent (India and Pakistan) towards the wireless handheld technology in the healthcare setting. A mixed methodology was adopted to explore the determinants of the wireless handheld devices in the healthcare setting. Interviews were conducted with 30 healthcare professionals to explore the initial themes. ⋯ Factor analysis through SPSS showed that any development of technological solutions for handheld devices would benefit, by considering the clinical, technological, and operational influences of the wireless technology in addition to clinical influences, clinical preference, training, and technical support. The study culminated in the development of an initial conceptual framework. The scope of this study is restricted to wireless handheld devices such as the smart phones, handheld PCs and PDAs.
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In the last few years, Electronic Health Record (EHR) systems have received a great attention in the literature, as well as in the industry. They are expected to lead to health care savings, increase health care quality and reduce medical errors. This interest has been accompanied by the development of different standards and frameworks to meet EHR challenges. ⋯ Second, the current security profiles for more complex security requirements are oversimplified, vague and do not consider architectural design. This recently changed to some extend e.g., with the introduction of newly published white papers regarding privacy [5] and access control [9]. In order to solve the first problem we utilize results of previous studies conducted in the area of security-aware IHE-based systems and the state-of-the-art Security-as-a-Service approach as a convenient methodology to group domain-wide security needs and overcome the end point security shortcomings.
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Stud Health Technol Inform · Jan 2010
A myoelectric-controlled virtual hand for the assessment and treatment of phantom limb pain in trans-radial upper extremity amputees: a research protocol.
At least 90% of individuals of limb amputees experience phantom limb pain (PLP). Recent clinical research suggests that providing patients with the mirror image representation of the amputated limb may alleviate PLP. However, mirror therapy cannot be used with bilateral amputees, as visual feedback is dependent on the movement of the intact limb. ⋯ The proposed system allows the patient to directly control the virtual limb by recognizing stump muscle patterns recorded with EMG sensors. The hypothesis behind this strategy is that the VR image of the amputated limb induces better limb imagery than the reflected image of their intact limb and, therefore, is more effective in reducing PLP. A research protocol to test this hypothesis is described.
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In this introduction we summarize the contributions to the Fourth International Conference Information Technology in Health Care: Socio-technical Approaches. We argue that putting to use information systems in health care is a difficult and winding road. ⋯ But this understanding should also lead to better design and implementation methods. Therefore this conference wishes to address the challenges of safe systems and patient safety, ten years after the publication of the landmark reports on human error and quality of health care by the Institute of Medicine.
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Stud Health Technol Inform · Jan 2010
Auto-selection of DRG codes from discharge summaries by text mining in several hospitals: analysis of difference of discharge summaries.
Recently, electronic medical record (EMR) systems have become popular in Japan, and number of discharge summaries is stored electronically, though they have not been reutilized yet. We performed text mining with Tf-idf method and morphological analysis in the discharge summaries from three Hospitals (Chiba University Hospital, St. Luke's International Hospital and Saga University Hospital). ⋯ Beyond different styles of the discharge summaries, text mining method could obtain proper extracts of proper DPC codes. Improvement was observed by using integrated model data between the hospitals. It seemed that huge database which contains the data of many hospitals can improve the precision of text mining.