International Journal of Electronic Healthcare最新文献

Task and error analysis research was performed to identify: a) the process for healthcare organisations in managing healthcare for patients with mental illness or substance abuse; b) how the process can be enhanced and; c) if electronic medical records (EMRs) have a role in this process from a business and safety perspective. The research question is if EMRs have a role in enhancing the healthcare for patients with mental illness or substance abuse. A discussion on the business of EMRs is addressed to understand the balancing act between the safety and business aspects of an EMR.

A multi-layer artificial neural network (ANN)-based heart rate variability (HRV) classifier has been proposed, which gives the cardiac health status as the output based on HRV of the patients independently of the cardiologists' view. The electrocardiogram (ECG) data of 46 patients were recorded in the out-patient department (OPD) of a hospital and HRV was evaluated using self-designed autoregressive-model-based technique. These patients suspected to be suffering from cardiac abnormalities were thoroughly examined by experienced cardiologists. On the basis of symptoms and other investigations, the attending cardiologists advised them to be classified into four categories as per the severity of cardiac health. Out of 46, the HRV data of 28 patients were used for training and data of 18 patients were used for testing of the proposed classifier. The cardiac health classification of each tested patient with the proposed classifier matches with the medical opinion of the cardiologists.

The objective of this systematic review was to explore the role of mobile phone technologies in delivering health education programs in Asian and African countries. The search engine used was Pubmed during 2008-2011. Randomised controlled trials or controlled studies that improved health outcomes through delivery of health educational interventions using cell phone or text messaging were included in the review. Results showed studies from six Asian and African countries including Philippines, China, Kenya, South Korea, Taiwan and India. Mobile phone technology has shown to improve health outcomes for chronic disease conditions such as diabetes, heart disease and hypertension. Additional conditions include obesity and cardiopulmonary resuscitation guidance. Other studies have shown improvement in self management of breast cancer and post-hospitalisation HIV and pharmaceutical care. Overall results of the present review showed that mobile phone technologies can be a possible solution to improve healthcare outcome.

E-prescription systems can help improve patient service, safety and quality of care. They can also help achieve better compliance for the patients and better alignment with the guidelines for the practitioners. The recently implemented national e-prescription system in Greece already covers approximately 85% of all prescriptions prescribed in Greece today (approximately 5.5 million per month). The system has not only contributed already in significant changes towards improving services and better monitoring and planning of public health, but also substantially helped to contain unnecessary expenditure related to medication use and improve transparency and administrative control. Such issues have gained increasing importance not only for Greece but also for many other national healthcare systems that have to cope with the continuous rise of medication expenditure. Our implementation has, therefore, shown that besides their importance for improving services, national e-prescription systems can also provide a valuable tool for better utilisation of resources and for containing unnecessary healthcare costs, thus contributing to the improvement of the financial stability and viability of the overall healthcare system.

There is a paucity of research on the impact of computerised provider order entry (CPOE) system on the front line staff. We assessed nurses perspectives of the impact of CPOE system implementation on their workflow, patient safety and medication errors in a Saudi Arabian hospital. We conducted a cross-sectional survey involving 112 nurses between April and May 2012. The workflow was easy to manage for nurses who rated CPOE training as of good quality (p = 0.001) and they found that CPOE helped in reducing medication errors (p = 0.001). The nurses who rated CPOE training as of good quality also stated that patient safety was better with CPOE implementation and its use (p < 0.05). Provision of adequate CPOE training improves nurses' perception of the system's role in their workflow, patient safety and medication errors, and is critical in the success of CPOE use and its long-term adoption.

In industrialised countries, telemedicine has proven to be a valuable tool for enabling access to knowledge and allowing information exchange, and showing that it is possible to provide good quality of healthcare to isolated communities. However, there are many barriers to the widespread implementation of telemedicine in rural areas of developing countries. These include deficient internet connectivity and sophisticated peripheral medical devices. Furthermore, developing countries have very high patients-per-doctor ratios. In this paper, we report our work on developing a cloud-based health information system, which promotes telemedicine and patient-centred healthcare by exploiting modern information and communication technologies such as OWL-ontologies and SQL-triggers. The reason for using cloud technology is twofold. First, cloud service models are easily adaptable for sharing patients health information, which is of prime importance in patient-centred healthcare as well as in telemedicine. Second, the cloud and the consulting physicians may locate anywhere in the internet.

The objective of our study is to evaluate information about the national health programmes in India, available over the internet and to study the challenges faced while acquiring this information. To achieve our objective, we used the key words national health programmes OR public health programmes OR health programs AND India in Google from January 1-January 10 2012, to find information about the existing health programmes. We chose first 20 web links across all the three search terms to yield 60 websites, which were then reviewed for their relevance. Only 16 websites were found to be relevant that met the inclusion criteria. The study showed that there was inadequate information about the existing national health programmes in India. This suggests a need to develop a national public health IT portal that can disseminate information about the various health programmes in a more structured manner and which is tailored to the needs of diverse group of stakeholders.

Existing health information systems largely only support the daily operations of a medical centre, and are unable to generate the information required by executives for decision-making. Building on past research concerning information retrieval behaviour and learning through mental models, this study examines the use of information systems by hospital executives in medical centres. It uses a structural equation model to help find ways hospital executives might use information systems more effectively. The results show that computer self-efficacy directly affects the maintenance of mental models, and that system characteristics directly impact learning styles and information retrieval behaviour. Other results include the significant impact of perceived environmental uncertainty on scan searches; information retrieval behaviour and focused searches on mental models and perceived efficiency; scan searches on mental model building; learning styles and model building on perceived efficiency; and finally the impact of mental model maintenance on perceived efficiency and effectiveness.