Studies in health technology and informatics
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The complexity of hospital operations ensures that one-size-fits-all solutions seldom work. As hospitals turn to evidence based strategies to redesign flow, it is critical that they tailor the strategies to suit their individual service. This paper analyses the effect of hospital occupancy on inpatient and emergency department patient flow parameters at the Caboolture hospital in Queensland, Australia, and identifies critical levels, or choke points, that result in performance decline. ⋯ We compare these findings to a previous study that has analysed patient flow across Queensland hospitals grouped by size, and discover several differences in the interaction between rising occupancy and patient flow parameters including rates of patient flow, length of stay, and access block. We also identify significantly higher choke points for Caboolture hospital as compared to other similarly sized Queensland hospitals, which suggest that patient flow here can be redesigned to operate at higher levels of occupancy without degrading flow performance. The findings support arguments for hospitals to analyse patient flow at a service level to deliver optimum service improvement.
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Stud Health Technol Inform · Jan 2013
Developing a multivariate electronic medical record integration model for primary health care.
This paper describes the development of a multivariate electronic medical record (EMR) integration model for the primary health care setting. Our working hypothesis is that an integrated EMR is associated with high quality primary health care. ⋯ To test the face validity of this model, a Delphi study is being planned where health care providers and information technology professionals involved with EMR adoption are polled for their feedback. This model has the potential to quantify and explain the factors that influence successful EMR integration to improve primary health care.
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Stud Health Technol Inform · Jan 2013
Do electronic health records help undergraduate health informatics students to develop health informatics competencies?
The purpose of this paper is to determine the effects of hands-on exposure to an educational electronic health record (EHR) system upon undergraduate health informatics (HI) student competency development. We undertook a quasi-experimental study (i.e. pre-test, post-test design), where students were given the opportunity to do hands-on work with an educational EHR over a 10 week period. ⋯ Several HI student competencies improved significantly following hands-on work with the EHR. As well, students provided more higher quality case study answerfollowing EHR use.
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Stud Health Technol Inform · Jan 2013
Observational StudyDeveloping and applying a cross-disciplinary team handover information system.
In order to avoid medical errors, it is very important to communicate with the medical team correctly, timely and efficiently. One of main reasons for the poor outcome of multidisciplinary handover in hospital is lacking effective tools for multidisciplinary handover. The project aimed to develop a workflow-based multidisciplinary handover information system, integrated with medical record browsing, multidisciplinary handover and event tracking, to improve the correctness and effectiveness of communication among the medical team members.
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Stud Health Technol Inform · Jan 2013
Video segmentation of moving humans for assistive environments.
In this paper, we present two recently proposed efficient methods for human segmentation from video in indoor environments: the illumination sensitive background method and the self-organizing background subtraction (SOBS) method. Both methods maintain multiple background models. ⋯ The video data are acquired indoors from a fixed fish-eye camera in the living environment. The paper presents the algorithmic implementation and modifications details, while results are also presented for a small number of video sequences.