Studies in health technology and informatics
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Stud Health Technol Inform · Jan 2012
Rate of surgery in a sample of patients fulfilling the SRS inclusion criteria treated with a Chêneau brace of actual standard.
Studies investigating the outcome of conservative scoliosis treatment differ widely with respect to the inclusion criteria used. Prospective cohort studies are available using the SRS inclusion criteria for studies on bracing. This seems to provide a great advantage to compare different strategies of bracing against each other. As we have gathered all data of the patients treated with a Chêneau light TM between June 2005 and November 2007 it was possible to identify the sample of patients fulfilling the SRS inclusion criteria from the whole sample. ⋯ Rate of surgery can be reduced with the help of Chêneau braces of the latest standard and satisfactory in-brace correction. Brace treatment with the Chêneau brace seems effective and therefore clearly is indicated. Clinical outcomes may be more important for the patient than radiologic outcomes.
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Automated encoding of free-text clinical narratives using concepts from terminological systems is widely performed. However, the majority of natural language processing (NLP) tools and terminological systems involve the English language. As parts of the NLP process are language independent, and tools for various languages are available, an overview is needed to determine the applicability to performing NLP of Dutch medical texts. ⋯ Most of them are suitable for English free text, some of them are (also) usable for Dutch. To enable automated encoding of Dutch free text narratives, further research is needed to create a spelling checker, a negation detector, a domain-specific abbreviation/acronym list, and a concept mapper (to map Dutch terms to concepts in a terminological system). Furthermore evaluation of performance for the Dutch 'medical' language is needed.
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Stud Health Technol Inform · Jan 2012
Nation-wide primary healthcare research network: a privacy protection assessment.
Efficiency and privacy protection are essential when setting up nationwide research networks. This paper investigates the extent to which basic services developed to support the provision of care can be re-used, whilst preserving an acceptable privacy protection level, within a large Belgian primary care research network. ⋯ A short analysis of the current architecture is provided. Our generic model could also be used in other countries.
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Stud Health Technol Inform · Jan 2012
Promotion of emotional wellbeing in oncology inpatients using VR.
In Psycho-oncology, VR has been utilized mainly to manage pain and distress associated to medical procedures and chemotherapy, with very few applications aimed at promotion of wellbeing in hospitalized patients. Considering this, it was implemented a psychological intervention that uses VR to induce positive emotions on adult oncology inpatients with the purpose of evaluating its utility to improve emotional wellbeing in this population. ⋯ Results emphasize the potential of VR as a positive technology that can be used to promote wellbeing during hospitalization, especially considering the shortness of the intervention and the advanced state of disease of the participants. Despite the encouraging of these results, it is necessary to confirm them in studies with larger samples and control groups.
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The realisation of semantic interoperability, in which any EHR data may be communicated between heterogeneous systems and fully understood by computers as well as people on receipt, is a challenging goal. Despite the use of standardised generic models for the EHR and standard terminology systems, too much optionality and variability exists in how particular clinical entries may be represented. Clinical archetypes provide a means of defining how generic models should be shaped and bound to terminology for specific kinds of clinical data. ⋯ Drawing on several years of work within communities of practice developing archetypes and implementing systems from them, this paper presents quality requirements for the development of archetypes. Clinical engagement on a wide scale is also needed to help grow libraries of good quality archetypes that can be certified. Vendor and eHealth programme engagement is needed to validate such archetypes and achieve safe, meaningful exchange of EHR data between systems.