International Journal of Electronic Healthcare最新文献

Continuous foetal monitoring of physiological signals is of particular importance for early detection of complexities related to the foetus or the mother's health. The available conventional methods of monitoring mostly perform off-line analysis and restrict the mobility of subjects within a hospital or a room. Hence, the aim of this paper is to develop a foetal e-health monitoring system using mobile phones and wireless sensors for providing advanced healthcare services in the home environment. The system is tested by recording the real-time Foetal Phonocardiography (fPCG) signals from 15 subjects with different gestational periods. The performance of the developed system is compared with the existing ultrasound based Doppler shift technique, ensuring an overall accuracy of 98% of the developed system. The developed framework is non-invasive, cost-effective and simple enough to be used in home care application. It offers advanced healthcare facilities even to the pregnant women living in rural areas and avoids their unnecessary visits at the healthcare centres.

The introduction of the US government's Meaningful Use criteria carries with it many implications including the training curriculum of healthcare personnel. This study examines 108 health informatics degree programmes across the USA. First, the courses offered are identified and classified into generic classes. Next, these generic groupings are mapped to two important frameworks: the Learning to Manage Health Information (LMHI) academic framework; and the Meaningful Use criteria policy framework. Results suggest that while current curricula seemed acceptable in addressing Meaningful Use Stage 1 objective, there was insufficient evidence that these curricula could support Meaningful Use Stage 2 and Stage 3. These findings are useful to both curriculum developers and the healthcare industry. Curriculum developers in health informatics must match curriculum to the emerging healthcare policy goals and the healthcare industry must now recruit highly trained and qualified personnel to help achieve these new goals of data-capture, data-sharing and intelligence.

Virtual healthcare communities aim to bring together healthcare professionals and patients, improve the quality of healthcare services and assist healthcare professionals and researchers in their everyday activities. In a secure and reliable environment, patients share their medical data with doctors, expect confidentiality and demand reliable medical consultation. Apart from a concrete policy framework, several ethical, legal and technical issues must be considered in order to build a trustful community. This research emphasises on security issues, which can arise inside a virtual healthcare community and relate to the communication and storage of data. It capitalises on a standardised risk management methodology and a prototype architecture for healthcare community portals and justifies a security model that allows the identification, estimation and evaluation of potential security risks for the community. A hypothetical virtual healthcare community is employed in order to portray security risks and the solutions that the security model provides.

The objective of this study was to examine the relative efficacy of two different methodologies for auditing self-funded medical claim expenses: 100-percent-of-claims auditing versus random-sampling auditing. Multiple data sets of claim errors or 'exceptions' from two Fortune-100 corporations were analysed and compared to 100 simulated audits of 300- and 400-claim random samples. Random-sample simulations failed to identify a significant number and amount of the errors that ranged from $200,000 to $750,000. These results suggest that health plan expenses of corporations could be significantly reduced if they audited 100% of claims and embraced a zero-defect approach.

There are many studies that have tried to evaluate some of the determining factors in smoking cessation, but with limited success. In particular, the present study deals with these concerns within the context of the current global recession and the roles of technology and social networking as moderating variables in the examination of smoking working professionals' relationships between people's background experiences with smoking, their self-reported perceptions about health, economic, and social aspects of smoking, and their perspectives on quitting. The empirical section examines current opinions of smoking analogues as alternatives to cessation and identify whether these opinions were influenced by negative perspectives of smoking in general. Several hypotheses and factor analyses related to smoking cessation statistically evaluated assumptions that economic and social considerations had more effects on quitting than health concerns; personal experience with smoking leads to less confidence in cold turkey quitting; and that technology-based solutions and virtual communities can gain wide acceptance despite the chemical addictiveness of tobacco-related products.

Patient-centred healthcare subscribes to the belief that the patient has strengths, values and experiences that are important in the healthcare experience and relationship between those providing care and the patient. It requires patients to have the ability to obtain and understand health information, and make appropriate health decisions. The main problem here is that though the e-health applications provide patients and consumer with access to health information, each application is still individually used and the used and produced information remains within each system. In this paper, we present our work on developing a Personal Health Server, which allows the interoperation of e-health tools through the shared ontology. The ontology is developed by integrating the ontologies of the e-health tools, which support personal health records, e-health oriented blogs and information therapy. Technically the Personal Health Server is based on knowledge management technologies, and it is easily extensible to capture additional e-health tools.

A general overview of various blood products operational effectiveness and related strategies that can be utilised by service providers (in particular, healthcare providers) is presented in the present study. In terms of the massive volumes of blood products, the North American blood centres collect more than eight million units of whole blood, which represents appropriately 50% of the US and Quebec, Canada?s volunteer donor blood supply. A case study of the quality inspection and inventory control concerns of the Central Blood Bank, located in the metropolitan area of Pittsburgh, PA, is presented. Initially, brief introduction to its general operating environment is followed by sections describing its general situation, quality-service initiatives, and followed by a fairly detailed discussion of the practical applications of lessons learned from the case study.

The utilisation of IS/IT could offer a substantial competitive advantage to healthcare service providers through the realisation of improved clinical, financial, and administrative outcomes. In this study, 42 journal articles were reviewed and summarised with respect to identified benefits and challenges of the development and implementation of electronic medical records, tele-health, and electronic appointment reminders. Results of this study help pave the knowledge foundation for management of the behavioural healthcare to learn how to apply state-of-the-art information technology to offer higher quality, clinically proven effective services at lower costs than those of their competitors.

Patient nonadherence is a growing and costly problem in the healthcare system, especially for patients with chronic illness. Between 25% and 40% of patients are nonadherent to treatment, and estimated costs directly associated with patient nonadherence in the US healthcare system are $290 billion a year. Nonadherence to preventive and treatment regimens is correlated to negative consequences for patients; however, many barriers to the promotion of successful adherence remain. Some such barriers include financial constraints, physical disability, side effects, forgetfulness, age and complex multi-drug regimens. The implementation of technology in healthcare systems is changing the way in which healthcare providers and patients must approach adherence. The following review applies a framework, the Information-Motivation-Strategy Model?, developed by DiMatteo and colleagues, to the field to conceptualise the changing factors affecting patient adherence as global healthcare moves toward increasingly technology-based systems of care.

Several researchers share the concern of healthcare information systems failing to support communication and collaboration in clinical practices. The objective of this paper is to investigate the current state of computer-supported patient information exchange and associated communication between clinicians. We report findings from a national survey on Finnish physicians? experiences with their currently used clinical information systems with regard to patient information documentation, retrieval, management and exchange-related tasks. The questionnaire study with 3929 physicians indicated the main concern being cross-organisational patient information delivery. In addition, physicians argued computer usage increasingly steals time and attention from caring activities and even disturbs physician?nurse collaboration. Problems in information management were particularly emphasised among those physicians working in hospitals and wards. The survey findings indicated that collaborative applications and mobile or wireless solutions have not been widely adapted in Finnish healthcare and suggested an urgent need for adopting appropriate information and communication technology applications to support information exchange and communication between physicians, and physicians and nurses.