Studies in health technology and informatics
-
Stud Health Technol Inform · Jan 2015
Clinical Informatics Board Specialty Certification for Physicians: A Global View.
Clinical informatics workforce development is a high priority for medicine. Professional board certification for physicians is an important tool to demonstrating excellence. The recent recognition of clinical informatics as a subspecialty board in the U. ⋯ Training and certification for non-physician informatics professionals in allied areas are widespread. Official recognition and certification for physicians and all informatics professionals represents a key component of capacity building and a means of addressing the shortage of a skilled informatics workforce. Wider adoption of certification programs may further attracting talent and accelerate growth of the field.
-
Stud Health Technol Inform · Jan 2015
High Override Rate for Opioid Drug-allergy Interaction Alerts: Current Trends and Recommendations for Future.
This study examined trends in drug-allergy interaction (DAI) alert overrides for opioid medications - the most commonly triggered alerts in the computerized provider order entry (CPOE). We conducted an observational analysis of the DAI opioid alerts triggered over the last decade (2004-2013, n=342,338) in two large academic hospitals in Boston (United States). We found an increasing rate of DAI alert overrides culminating in 89.7% in 2013. ⋯ About one-third of the alert override reasons pointed to irrelevant alerts (i.e."Patient has tolerated the medication before") and 44.9% were unknown. Those findings warrant further investigation into providers' reasons for high override rate. User interfaces should evolve to enable less interruptive and more accurate alerts to decrease alert fatigue.
-
Stud Health Technol Inform · Jan 2015
Development and evaluation of task-specific NLP framework in China.
Natural language processing (NLP) has been designed to convert narrative text into structured data. Although some general NLP architectures have been developed, a task-specific NLP framework to facilitate the effective use of data is still a challenge in lexical resource limited regions, such as China. ⋯ In this framework, a shared and evolving ontology mechanism was designed. The result has shown that such a free text driven platform will accelerate the NLP technology acceptance in China.
-
Stud Health Technol Inform · Jan 2015
Review Meta AnalysisIdentification of Patient Safety Risks Associated with Electronic Health Records: A Software Quality Perspective.
Although Electronic Health Records (EHR) can offer benefits to the health care process, there is a growing body of evidence that these systems can also incur risks to patient safety when developed or used improperly. This work is a literature review to identify these risks from a software quality perspective. ⋯ This work elucidates the fact that EHR quality problems can adversely affect patient safety, resulting in errors such as incorrect patient identification, incorrect calculation of medication dosages, and lack of access to patient data. Therefore, the risks presented here provide the basis for developers and EHR regulating bodies to pay attention to the quality aspects of these systems that can result in patient harm.
-
The last six years the global community is facing an economic crisis that first appeared in USA. This crisis has a lot of impacts especially in health sector. Unemployment, job insecurity and the loss of disposable income have a significant impact in health too. ⋯ To collect the data it has been used the Greek version of Short Form (36) Health Survey (SF-36v2). In general, income, level of education, cohabitation and parenthood had a significant impact in quality of life. As a conclusion, unemployed participants' score was lower in the entire dimensions and in the two summary scales too.