Leung AA et al, Journal of General Internal Medicine, 2011
BACKGROUND
It is uncertain if computerized physician order entry (CPOE) systems are effective at reducing adverse drug event (ADE) rates in community hospitals, where mainly vendor-developed applications are used.
OBJECTIVE
To evaluate the impact of vendor CPOE systems on the frequency of ADEs.
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Dombkowski KJ et al, American Journal of Preventive Medicine, 42(1)
Background
Children with chronic conditions have an increased risk of complications from influenza and have low influenza vaccination rates.
Purpose
To assess the feasibility and effectiveness of using a statewide immunization information system (IIS) for seasonal influenza vaccine reminders from local health departments (LHDs) targeting children with high-risk conditions.
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Prados-Suárez B et al, Expert Systems with Applications, 2012
This paper aims to solve a recently arose problem, related to the access to the Electronic Health Records (EHR) in the Hospitals. Due to the digitalization of the information contained in the medical records, and the growing availability of devices that directly generate digital documents to include in it, the EHR are becoming unmanageable. Even more, to find a concrete item of information relevant for a given assistance act is a very hard, difficult and time-consuming task. To solve it we propose here the definition of contexts of access to the EHR, to exploit the logical division of the information inside each document in the EHR into data groups, and the computation of the pertinence of each data group to each context.
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Bouhaddou O et al, Journal of Biomedical Informatics, 2012
The increased need for interoperable electronic health records in health care organizations underscores the importance of standards. The US Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) has a long history of developing and adopting various types of health care data standards. The authors present in detail their experience in this domain. A formal organization within VA is responsible for helping to develop and implement standards. This group has produced a Standards Life Cycle (SLC) process endorsed by VA key business and information technology (IT) stakeholders. It coordinates the identification, description, and implementation of standards aligned with VA business requirements.
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Tolar M, Balka E. International Journal of Medical Informatics, 2012
It is argued that with the introduction of electronic medical record (EMR) systems into the primary care sector, data collected can be used for secondary purposes which extend beyond individual patient care (e.g., for chronic disease management, prevention and clinical performance evaluation). However, EMR systems are primarily designed to support clinical tasks, and data entry practices of clinicians focus on the treatment of individual patients. Hence data collected through EMRs is not always useful in meeting these ends.
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Winston ER et al, Computers in Human Behavior, 2012
Decreasing revenues and increasing expenses has led many healthcare organizations to adopt newer technological applications in order to address the informational needs of their patients. One such adoption technique is to develop a more robust e-patient environment. Health care organizations may increase their effectiveness in meeting the needs of a growing e-patient population through the implementation of high-quality social networking applications such as Twitter. These applications may help to support and maintain a valuable and informed community.
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Trajkovik V et al, Health and Technology, 2012
Adoption of mobile devices and technology in the field of medical monitoring and personal health care systems is very important nowadays, especially when it comes to certain categories of people with chronicle diseases who need 24 hour access to medical care. The collaborative Information system model we present in this paper, gives a new dimension in the usage of novel technologies in healthcare. Using mobile, web and broadband technologies enable the citizens to have ubiquity of support services where ever they may be.
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Ip IK et al, Journal of the American College of Radiology, 9(2)
Purpose
The aim of this study was to assess whether an integrated imaging computerized physician order entry (CPOE) system with embedded decision support for imaging can be accepted clinically.
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Goran SF. Critical Care Nurse, 32(1)
The tele-intensive care unit (tele-ICU) uses sophisticated telemedicine technology and a remote team of critical care experts, including nurses, to provide continuous monitoring, assessment, and interventional services to a large number of patients across multiple ICUs. This new practice environment offers experienced critical care nurses an opportunity for career and knowledge expansion while reducing some of the physical and emotional risks encountered at the bedside.
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Watson A et al, J Med Internet Res, 14(1)
Background:
Addressing the obesity epidemic requires the development of effective, scalable interventions. Pedometers and Web-based programs are beneficial in increasing activity levels but might be enhanced by the addition of nonhuman coaching.
Objectives:
We hypothesized that a virtual coach would increase activity levels, via step count, in overweight or obese individuals beyond the effect observed using a pedometer and website alone.
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Kim MJ et al, International Journal of Medical Informatics, 2012
Purpose
Specialty consultations and waiting for admission to a hospital bed are major contributors to increased length of stay and overcrowding in the emergency department. We implemented a computerized short messaging service to inform care providers of patient delay in order to reduce length of stay. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the effects of this strategy on length of stay in the emergency department.
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Westbrook JI et al, PLoS Med, 9(1)
Background
Considerable investments are being made in commercial electronic prescribing systems (e-prescribing) in many countries. Few studies have measured or evaluated their effectiveness at reducing prescribing error rates, and interactions between system design and errors are not well understood, despite increasing concerns regarding new errors associated with system use. This study evaluated the effectiveness of two commercial e-prescribing systems in reducing prescribing error rates and their propensities for introducing new types of error.
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Li YC et al, Yearbook of Medical Informatics, 2009(1)
OBJECTIVE
Increasing patient demand for convenient access to their own healthcare data has led to more personal use of the Electronic Health Record (EHR). With “consumer empowerment” being an important issue of EHR, we are seeing a more “patient-centric” approach of EHR from countries around the world. Researchers have reported on issues in EHR sharing including concerns on privacy and security, consumer empowerment, competition among providers, and content standards. This study attempts to analyze prior research and to synthesize comprehensive, empirically-based conceptual models of EHR for personal use.
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Nsanzimana S et al, Journal of Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndromes, 59(2)
BACKGROUND
Monitoring and evaluation of antiretroviral treatment (ART) scale-up has been challenging in resource-limited settings. We describe an innovative cell-phone-based and internet-based reporting system (TRACnet) utilized in Rwanda.
METHODS
From January 2004 to June 30, 2010, all health facilities with ART services submitted standardized monthly aggregate reports of key indicators. National cohort data were analyzed to examine trends in characteristics of patients initiating ART and cumulative cohort outcomes. Estimates of HIV-infected patients eligible for ART were obtained from Joint United Nations Program on HIV/AIDS (Estimation and Projection Package-Spectrum, 2010).
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Mathias JS et al, J Am Med Inform Assoc, 2012
Background
National organizations historically focused on increasing use of effective services are now attempting to identify and discourage use of low-value services. Electronic health records (EHRs) could be used to measure use of low-value services, but few studies have examined this. The aim of the study was to: (1) determine if EHR data can be used to identify women eligible for an extended Pap testing interval; (2) determine the proportion of these women who received a Pap test sooner than recommended; and (3) assess the consequences of these low-value Pap tests.MethodsElectronic query of EHR data identified women aged 30-65 years old who were at low-risk of cervical cancer and therefore eligible for an extended Pap testing interval of 3 years (as per professional society guidelines). Manual chart review assessed query accuracy.
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Atalag K et al, electronic Journal of Health Informatics, 7(1)
Maintaining health information systems over time requires significant effort and time. This is especially marked in clinical information systems where most, if not all, functional software requirements are dependent on healthcare concepts and processes which are prone to high rate of change. Software engineering literature indicates that maintenance tasks alone may constitute 70-80% of the total development cost. It has been suggested that openEHR based systems will effectively tackle this by separating domain knowledge from software code. The objective of this paper is to assess the maintainability of an openEHR based clinical application with comparison to another application based on the same functional requirements but implemented using traditional development methods.
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Haug S et al, BMC Public Health, 12(1)
BACKGROUND:
Particularly in groups of adolescents with lower educational level the smoking prevalence is still high and constitutes a serious public health problem. There is limited evidence of effective smoking cessation interventions in this group. Individualised text messaging (SMS) based interventions are promising to support smoking cessation and could be provided to adolescents irrespective of their motivation to quit. The aim of the current paper is to outline the study protocol of a trial testing the efficacy of an SMS based intervention for smoking cessation in apprentices.
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Ross SE et al, J Med Internet Res, 13(3)
BACKGROUND
Adverse drug events are a major safety issue in ambulatory care. Improving medication self-management could reduce these adverse events. Researchers have developed medication applications for tethered personal health records (PHRs), but little has been reported about medication applications for interoperable PHRs.
OBJECTIVE
Our objective was to develop two complementary personal health applications on a common PHR platform: one to assist children with complex health needs (MyMediHealth), and one to assist older adults in care transitions (Colorado Care Tablet).
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Schuemie MJ et al, Pharmacoepidemiology and Drug Safety, 2012
PURPOSE:
Increasingly, patient information is stored in electronic medical records, which could be reused for research. Often these records comprise unstructured narrative data, which are cumbersome to analyze. The authors investigated whether text mining can make these data suitable for epidemiological studies and compared a concept recognition approach and a range of machine learning techniques that require a manually annotated training set. The authors show how this training set can be created with minimal effort by using a broad database query.
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Dumortier J, Verhenneman G. SSRN, 2011
This chapter critically analyzes the legal and regulatory framework for Electronic Health Records in Europe and the US. At both parts of the world, the development of EHRs is evolving quickly, but many different approaches have proven possible. Different approaches resulted in different EHR solutions and different regulatory instruments. In Europe governmental bodies have been the driving force behind the development and implementation of EHRs. Consequently many European countries established a new legal framework simultaneously with the roll-out of government-initiated eHealth structures.
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