Studies in health technology and informatics
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Stud Health Technol Inform · Jan 2014
Pediatric emergency department crowding: survival tree clustering for length of patient stay.
The objective of this study is to analyse the length of patient stay in Pediatric emergency department according to diagnosis and the number of patients over a 3 year-period. A survival tree was used, to explore the underlying construct of overcrowding depending of the length of patient stay. ⋯ The hazard ratio test was used to determine optimal partition. The approach is illustrated using Electronic Medical Record Software database available at the Pediatric Emergency Department of Lille University Hospital.
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Stud Health Technol Inform · Jan 2014
Analysis of operating theatre utilisation to drive efficiency and productivity improvements.
There is an urgent need in the acute health system to use resources as efficiently as possible. One such group of resources are operating theatres, which have an important impact on patient flow through a hospital. ⋯ It was found that day-long sessions (as opposed to separate morning or afternoon sessions), mid-week sessions, certain specialties (eg. neurosurgery sessions) and not doing the longest case first were most beneficial to theatre utilisation. Awareness of these findings is important in any redesign activity aimed at improving flow performance.
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Stud Health Technol Inform · Jan 2014
ReviewFrailty, Physical Frailty, Sarcopenia: A New Conceptual Model.
In the literature, different criteria have been validated to identify frail older subjects, which mainly refer to two conceptual models: the cumulative deficit approach proposed by Rockwood and the Physical Frailty (PF) phenotype proposed by Fried. Both models have received empirical validation. Nevertheless, the frailty phenotype is the most widely used and presents a characterized pathophysiologic background. ⋯ Therefore, sarcopenia may be considered both as the biological substrate for the development of PF and the pathway through which the negative health outcomes of frailty ensue. Although PF encompasses only a part of the frailty spectrum, the identification of a definite biological basis (i.e., skeletal muscle decline) opens new venues for the development of interventions to slow or reverse the progression of this condition. Here, we present a novel conceptualisation of PF which will possibly promote significant advancements over the traditional approaches to this syndrome by enabling the precise operationalisation of the condition, a clear identification of the affected population and the rapid translation of findings to the clinical arena.
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Early detection of outbreak of a disease may help in timely and effective public health interventions. Our motivation for this work is to assist EHD planning officer to analyze the incidence data and based on it declare whether there is an outbreak or not. In this paper, we develop ensemble of multiple techniques for detecting dengue disease outbreak. These techniques are applied to dengue incidence data from Singapore and results are summarized.
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Stud Health Technol Inform · Jan 2014
Building a common ground on the clinical case: design, implementation and evaluation of an information model for a Handover EHR.
Handovers need a common ground on the clinical cases between the members of the successive shifts to establish continuity of care. Conventional electronic patient record systems (EHR) proved to be only insufficiently suitable for supporting the grounding process. Against this background we proposed a basic concept for a handover EHR that extends general EHRs in particular openEHR based systems. ⋯ The information items of these cases could be mapped successfully to the model, however, the new class "anticipatory guidance" needed to be introduced. The evaluation also demonstrated the importance of highly aggregated information on the clinical case, opinions and meta-information such as the relevance of an item during handovers. Based on these findings, in particular the handover database, handover EHR applications are currently developed to support the grounding process.