Science Articles Archive
August 200727 posts, 20 posts per page.
“Searching the Internet for health care information has become more widespread in the past year. Over the last two years, the number of people who have used the Internet to search for health-related information has also increased markedly, (from 53% in 2005 to 71% currently). This brings the number of all U.S. adults who have ever searched for health information online (Harris Interactive® refers to them as “cyberchondriacs”) to 160 million, from 136 million in 2006 and 117 million in 2005 — a 37 percent increase over two years.”
Harris Interactive, July 31, 2007
“The country has identified health information exchange (HIE) as an essential strategy to address our crisis of cost, quality, and safety in health care. The Nationwide Health Information Network (NHIN) will consist of a “network of networks”–interconnected local or regional HIEs. We must create policy and technical interfaces that allow these local exchanges to share data with each other. ”
J. Marc Overhage, Health Affairs, 1 August, 2007
“Internet-based health-record management requires not only the provision of strong data protection to prevent privacy intrusion and unauthorized access, but also the introduction of a common healthcare-record format to allow cooperation using heterogeneous repositories held at various hospitals.”
“The proposed method for Internet-based exchange of patient data is particularly useful for cooperative healthcare and the creation of lifetime healthcare records.”
Jun Choe and Sun K. Yoo, Internet Journal Medical Informatics, 2 August, 2007
“This article explores e government inequalities to searching Medicare and Medicaid information online. Telehealth, a branch of e government, can bring public health service and insurance information to the citizen. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services website, among others, has critical information for potential beneficiaries and recipients of services.”
Schmeida, Mary., McNeal, Ramona S., Journal of Health Care for the Poor and Underserved, Vol. 18 nr. 3
Campbell EM et al, J Am Med Inform Assoc, 13(5)
To identify types of clinical unintended adverse consequences resulting from computerized provider order entry (CPOE) implementation.
An expert panel provided initial examples of adverse unintended consequences of CPOE. The authors, using qualitative methods, gathered and analyzed additional examples from five successful CPOE sites.
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Ash JS et al, J Am Med Inform Assoc, 14(4)
Computerized provider order entry (CPOE) systems can help hospitals improve health care quality, but they can also introduce new problems. The extent to which hospitals experience unintended consequences of CPOE, which include more than errors, has not been quantified in prior research.
To discover the extent and importance of unintended adverse consequences related to CPOE implementation in U.S. hospitals.
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O'Grady, Laura A., BMC Medical Informatics and Decision Making, 6
Members of the HIV/AIDS community are known to use web-based tools to support learning about treatment issues. Initial research indicated components such as message forums or web-based documentation were effectively used by persons with HIV/AIDS. Video has also shown promise as a technology to aid consumer health education. However, no research has been published thus far investigating the impact of web-based environments combining these components in an educational workshop format.
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“The aim of the study was to present the results of a detailed consultation with a variety of stakeholder groups in order to identify what they regard as the desirable, important, and feasible characteristics of an Internet-based intervention to aid diabetes self-management.”
“Involvement of stakeholders is vital early in the development of a complex intervention. Stakeholders have clear and relevant views on what a virtual clinic system should provide, and these views can be captured and synthesized with relative ease. This work has led to the design of a system that is able to meet user needs and is currently being evaluated in a pilot study.”
Armstrong N, Hearnshaw H, Powell J, Dale J, J Med Internet Res 2007;9(3):e23
Aarts, Jos et al, International Journal of Medical Informatics,76 Suppl 1
To describe the perceived effect of computerized physician order entry (CPOE) on professional collaboration, workflow and quality of care.
Semi-structured interviews with experts involved in the design, implementation and evaluation of computerized physician order systems in the United States.
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“To enable the goals of reducing medical errors, improving quality of care, and improving the validity of information available to care providers, Personal Health Records (PHRs) function to consolidate an individual’s medical information in one place. Recognizing the potential benefits of PHRs, HIMSS works with national consumer-based healthcare organizations to help educate and facilitate the adoption of PHRs. In so doing, HIMSS has taken an active role to facilitate interest in and discussion around this important topic.”
HIMSS, 10 August 2007
“To specify and evaluate a method for auditing medical terminological systems (TSs) based on detecting concepts with equivalent definitions. This method addresses two important problems: redundancy, where the same concept is represented more than once (described by different terms), and underspecification, where different concepts have the same representation and hence appear indistinguishable from each other.”
Ronald Cornet and Ameen Abu-Hanna, International Journal of Medical Informatics, 10 August 2007
“The influential American Medical Association (AMA) has thrown its weight behind what might be called medical human bar-coding by adopting a policy that endorses the provisional use of implantable radio frequency identification tags, or microchips, to store medical information under the skin of patients.
But delegates to the 2007 Annual Meeting of the AMA House of Delegates held in Chicago in June recommended approaching the brave new world of microchipping humans with caution.”
Wayne Kondro, CMAJ, August 14, 2007; 177 (4).
“We carried out an economic evaluation of the northernmost five sites of the British Columbia telehealth network. The videoconferencing network links health-care facilities in 12 communities with Vancouver, for clinical consultations, administrative meetings and educational sessions. The economic evaluation was based on the netcost criterion (i.e. cost of telehealth minus travel costs avoided). Cost and utilization data were obtained from client interviews and log data compiled between September 2001 and January 2003. The results showed that the subnetwork of five sites was not only cost reducing, but also cost-effective. Travel costs for administrative meetings were reduced by $724,457/annum and were greater than the annual fixed and variable costs of all the telehealth sessions ($553,740). A sensitivity analysis was conducted on six parameters: amortization period, opportunity cost of capital, operating cost of a telehealth session (by type of session), number of telehealth sessions, travel time and the opportunity cost of travel time. The study suggests that the cost-effectiveness of telehealth to remote areas will increase over time as the cost of equipment continues to fall, as network connections become cheaper and as utilization rates rise.”
Schaafsma, Joseph; Pantazi, Stefan V.; Moehr, Jochen R.; Anglin, Christine R.; Grimm, Nicole A., Journal of Telemedicine and Telecare, Volume 13, Number 5
“Telerehabilitation is the provision at a distance of rehabilitation services such as physiotherapy, speech pathology or occupational therapy. The primary aim is to provide equitable access to rehabilitation services. Broadly speaking, the technologies used for telemedicine-based physical rehabilitation can be classified as: (1) image-based telerehabilitation; (2) sensor-based telerehabilitation; and (3) virtual environments and virtual reality telerehabilitation. To date, much of the research has been technology focused, and has consisted of single case or small sample research designs. The next step is to demonstrate viable telerehabilitation services in real world environments using well controlled research methodologies with large patient cohorts. In addition, the broader issues of cost-benefit and cost-effectiveness require investigation. If this can be done, then the undoubted potential benefits of telerehabilitation, for both the patient and health-care systems, can be realized.”
Russell, Trevor G., Journal of Telemedicine and Telecare, Volume 13, Number 5
“Net cancer survival estimation is usually performed by computing relative survival (RS), which is defined as the ratio between observed and expected survival rates. The mortality of a reference population is required in order to compute the expected survival rate, which can be performed using a variety of statistical packages. A new Web interface to compute RS, called WAERS, has been developed by the Catalan Institute of Oncology. The reference population is first selected, and then the RS of a cohort is computed. A remote server is used for this purpose. A mock example serves to illustrate the use of the tool with a hypothetical cohort, for which RS is estimated based on three different reference populations (a province of Spain, an autonomous community (Region), and the entire Spanish population). At present, only mortality tables for different areas of Spain are available. Future improvements of this application will include mortality tables of Latin American and European Union countries, and stratified (control variable) analysis. This application can be also useful for cohort mortality studies and for registries of several diseases.”
Ramon Clèries; Joan Valls; Laura Esteban; Jordi Gálvez; Laura Pareja; Xavier Sanz; Luisa Alliste; José Miguel Martínez; Víctor Moreno; Xavier Bosch; Josep Maria Borràs; Josepa Maria Ribes, Medical Informatics & The Internet in Medicine, Volume 32, Issue 3
“With the anticipated growth in the older adult population in the next few years, information designers are examining new ways for assistive technologies to support independent living and quality of life for adults as they age. Central to the role of assistive technology to support and enhance quality of life is the development of non-obtrusive technologies. Despite the importance of non-obtrusiveness to the design of assistive technologies, there remains no standard definition of obtrusiveness or measurement instrument. A conceptual framework for obtrusiveness in home telehealth technologies has recently been proposed but has not yet been tested empirically. This project performed a secondary analysis of focus group and interview data to explore the presence of the dimensions of the obtrusiveness framework in older adults’ responses to information-based assistive technologies in residential care facilities. We found the existing data contained examples of each dimension (physical, usability, privacy, function, human interaction, self-concept, routine, and sustainability) and 16 of the 22 subcategories proposed by the obtrusiveness framework. These results provide general support for the framework, although further prospective validation research is needed. Potential enhancements to the framework are proposed.”
Karen L. Courtney; George Demiris; Brian K. Hensel, Medical Informatics & The Internet in Medicine, Volume 32, Issue 3
“The overall project objective was to assess the use of EHR technologies by the osteopathic physician members of the American Osteopathic Association (AOA). The AOA contracted with the Medical Group Management Association Center for Research (MGMA CFR) to conduct a survey to meet the project objectives.”
American Osteopathic Association and the Medical Group Management Association Center for Research
“Public demand for flexible access to health information and services is growing, encouraged by internet trends and policies promoting patient rights and empowerment.”
Claudia Pagliari, Don Detmer, Peter Singleton
in: BMJ 2007;335:330-333
“To examine the extent to which health information seeking behaviors vary across genders or are differentially associated with access to computers, the Internet, and online health information.”
“Recent technology initiatives in the US aimed at reducing disparities in access to online resources appear to have had little effect in facilitating equal access to web-based health information. ”
Daniel Lorence, Heeyoung Park, Health Information and Libraries Journal 24 (3)
“To date most of the research concerning consumer health information has focused on trust and quality of health information websites. In this research, we observed 48 consumers searching for four health-related topics (some of their own choosing) using Google.”
Celeste Latter, Health Informatics Journal, Vol. 13, No. 3