Studies in health technology and informatics
-
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.
-
Stud Health Technol Inform · Jan 2018
Security and Other Ethical Concerns of Instant Messaging in Healthcare.
There is a growing body of evidence highlighting the benefits of mobile health in terms of cost effectiveness, efficiency and patient satisfaction. These benefits have been further enhanced through the development of Instant Messaging (IM) applications (apps) that enable the transmission of images and text messages. The aim of this paper is to review the use of IM in clinical services, and to understand the medico legal concerns with regard to the security and management of protected health information on doctors' phones.
-
Stud Health Technol Inform · Jan 2018
Pending Laboratory Test Results at the Time of Discharge: A 3-Year Retrospective Comparison of Paper Versus Electronic Test Ordering in Three Emergency Departments.
Pending laboratory test results at discharge can have major adverse health outcomes. The availability of test results at discharge may depend on whether the tests were ordered electronically or by using a paper-based system. The aim of this study was to determine the rate of pending test results at time of discharge from Emergency Departments (ED), and compare the rate for paper-based and electronic orders across three EDs in New South Wales, Australia. ⋯ Similar differences were observed when analysis was done by year of ED presentation. Moreover, in a subgroup analysis that included the top five high volume tests, four of the five tests had significantly lower rates of pending test results for electronic orders than for paper-based orders. The study highlighted an important benefit of ordering tests via electronic system which can potentially improve patient outcomes.
-
Stud Health Technol Inform · Jan 2018
Data-Driven Assessment of Potentially Inappropriate Medication in the Elderly.
Multimorbid patients taking polypharmacy represent a growing population at high risk for inappropriate prescribing. Various lists for identifying potentially inappropriate medication are spread across scientific journals and difficult to access. ⋯ PIMBase is meant to be a web-based system and starting point for the data-driven assessment of polypharmacy to identify inappropriate medication and to improve the quality of prescribing. PIMBase is available at https://pimbase.kalis-amts.de.
-
Stud Health Technol Inform · Jan 2018
Learning Healthcare Systems in Pediatrics: Cross-Institutional and Data-Driven Decision-Support for Intensive Care Environments (CADDIE).
The vast amount of data generated in healthcare can be reused to support decision-making by developing clinical decision-support systems. Since evidence is lacking in Pediatrics, it seems to be beneficial to design future systems towards the vision of generating evidence through cross-institutional data analysis and continuous learning cycles. ⋯ Our approach has great potential to establish our vision of learning systems, which support decision-making in PICU by analyzing cross-institutional data and giving insights back to both, their own knowledge base and clinical care, to continuously learn about practices and evidence in Pediatrics.