Studies in health technology and informatics
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Non-contact measurements of cardiac pulse can provide robust measurement of heart rate (HR) without the annoyance of attaching electrodes to the body. In this paper we explore a novel and reliable method to carry out video-based HR estimation and propose various performance improvement over existing approaches. The investigated method uses Independent Component Analysis (ICA) to detect the underlying HR signal from a mixed source signal present in the RGB channels of the image. ⋯ We found that some of these methods are quite effective and efficient in terms of improving accuracy and latency of the system. We have made the code of our algorithms openly available to the scientific community so that other researchers can explore how to integrate video-based HR monitoring in novel health technology applications. We conclude by noting that recent advances in video-based HR monitoring permit computers to be aware of a user's psychophysiological status in real time.
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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.
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Stud Health Technol Inform · Jan 2015
Automated Detection of Postoperative Surgical Site Infections Using Supervised Methods with Electronic Health Record Data.
The National Surgical Quality Improvement Project (NSQIP) is widely recognized as "the best in the nation" surgical quality improvement resource in the United States. In particular, it rigorously defines postoperative morbidity outcomes, including surgical adverse events occurring within 30 days of surgery. ⋯ As a prototype system, we combined local EHR data with the NSQIP gold standard outcomes and developed machine learned models to retrospectively detect Surgical Site Infections (SSI), a particular family of adverse events that NSQIP extracts. The built models have high specificity (from 0.788 to 0.988) as well as very high negative predictive values (>0.98), reliably eliminating the vast majority of patients without SSI, thereby significantly reducing the NSQIP extractors' burden.
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Stud Health Technol Inform · Jan 2015
Developing an Emergency Physician Productivity Index Using Descriptive Health Analytics.
Emergency department (ED) crowding became a major barrier to receiving timely emergency care. At King Faisal Specialist Hospital and Research Center, Saudi Arabia, we identified variables and factors affecting crowding and performance to develop indicators to help evaluation and improvement. ⋯ Three variables were identified for their influence on productivity and performance; Number of Treated Patients per Physician, Patient Acuity Level and Treatment Time. The study suggested a formula to calculate the productivity index of each physician through dividing the Number of Treated Patients by Patient Acuity Level squared and Treatment Time to identify physicians with low productivity index and investigate causes and factors.
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Stud Health Technol Inform · Jan 2015
The Role of Medical Transcriptionists in Producing High-Quality Documentation.
This study aimed to investigate the quality-assurance work conducted by medical transcriptionists in the production of medical records, and the implications of these findings when designing a structured electronic patient record (EPR) system in which physicians are supposed to write documentation themselves. Both qualitative and quantitative methods were applied. Qualitative data were collected through informal discussions and focus-group interviews. ⋯ Each medical transcriptionist performs an average of more than six corrections per day, and approximately one of three dictations are corrected. We suggest that these correction and quality-assurance tasks need to be compensated for when designing and developing new structured EPRs. Some quality-assurance tasks may also advantageously be performed by secretaries in the future.