Studies in health technology and informatics
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Smart Homes may improve the care received by the elderly and those with disabilities that prevent them from conveniently accessing care from providers. This paper examines the structures and mechanisms of Smart Homes, explores the advantages and disadvantages for patients receiving care from the comfort of their own homes and describes a model that can be used to view the needs of patients involving Smart Home technologies.
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Stud Health Technol Inform · Jan 2019
Describing Telenurses' Decision Making Using Clinical Decision Support: Influential Factors Identified.
Understand the cognitive processes of telenurses' decision making with the use of health information systems (HIS), specifically Clinical Decision Support Systems (CDSS). In addition, identify the factors that influence how telenurses use CDSS. ⋯ Several factors were identified that influenced how telenurses made decisions while using the CDSS. It was found that the decision ladder model could be applied to describe telenurse strategies while using CDSS. The purpose of this paper is to describe the emerging factors that influence telenurses' decision making during a clinical simulation study in a telenursing call centre.
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Stud Health Technol Inform · Jan 2019
Using Simulation Technology to Improve Patient Safety in Airway Management by Practicing Otolaryngologists.
Simulation technology provides a safe environment to learn crisis resource management in stressful clinical scenarios, such as the acute airway. While a number of surgical simulation studies have assessed trainees, there remains a paucity of data on simulation benefits for practicing physicians. The objective of this study was to investigate the impact of a simulation symposium on airway management for practicing otolaryngologists. ⋯ Simulation with feedback may provide an opportunity for the practicing otolaryngologist to fulfill Continuing Medical Education and Professional Development requirements. This symposium allowed practicing otolaryngologists, including those in the community, to learn, develop, and refresh technical and communication skills while fulfilling certification requirements.
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Stud Health Technol Inform · Jan 2018
Does Point-of-Care Testing Impact Length of Stay in Emergency Departments (EDs)?: A Before and After Study of 26 Rural and Remote EDs.
The implementation of Point-of-Care Testing (PoCT) services across rural and remote emergency departments (EDs) by NSW Health Pathology has the potential to significantly improve timely access to results for certain types of pathology laboratory tests and help to deliver timely patient care. The aim of this study was to examine the impact of the implementation of PoCT on the length of stay (LOS) of patients in rural and remote EDs. A total of 3808 patients with a circulatory system illness were treated and discharged at any one of 22 rural and remote EDs during the study period. ⋯ Although average ED LOS was 11 minutes shorter in the post-PoCT period, the impact of PoCT on ED LOS was not conclusive after considering other important clinical factors (p=0.07). This study is the one of the few to examine changes in LOS following the introduction of PoCT in EDs in Australia. The study also identified areas where more robust methods could be applied in the future as the quality of PoCT data improves to further assess the potential effects of this technology on practice and outcomes.
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Stud Health Technol Inform · Jan 2018
Quro: Facilitating User Symptom Check Using a Personalised Chatbot-Oriented Dialogue System.
Automated conversational agents built with medical applications in mind, have the potential to reduce healthcare readmissions and improve accessibility to medical knowledge. In this work, we demonstrate the development and evaluation of an automated chatbot for triage and conditions assessment, based on user inputs in natural language. ⋯ Our chatbot system was able to predict user conditions correctly based on two sets of patient test cases with an average precision of 0.82. Our implementation demonstrates that a medical chatbot can help with automatic triage and pre-assessment of patients with simple symptom analysis and a conversational approach without the use of cumbersome form-based data entry.