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Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'Medical informatics'
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Mulenga, Jacob S. "Intranet systems engineering for medical informatics." Thesis, Cranfield University, 2002. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.396480.
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Houston, Andrea Lynn 1954. "Knowledge integration for medical informatics: An experiment on a cancer information system." Diss., The University of Arizona, 1998. http://hdl.handle.net/10150/288868.
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This research investigated the question of whether automatic or system-generated information classification methods can help humans better manage information. A series of four experiments were conducted; they investigated the usability (i.e., usefulness) of two automatic approaches to information classification, the concept space approach and a Kohonen-based SOM approach in the context of information retrieval. The concept space approach was evaluated in three different domains: Electronic Brainstorming (EBS) sessions, the Internet, and medical literature (the CancerLit collection). The Kohonen-based SOM approach was evaluated in the Internet and medical literature (CancerLit) domains only. In each case, the approach under investigation was compared with existing systems in order to demonstrate performance viability. The basic premise that information management, in particular information retrieval, can be successfully supported by system-based information classification techniques and that humans would find such techniques viable and useful was supported by the experiments. The concept space approach was more successful than the Kohonen-based SOM approach. After modifications to the algorithms based on user feedback from the EBS experiments had been made, users found the concept space approach results to be comparable (in the Internet study) or superior (in the CancerLit study) to existing information classification systems. The key future enhancement will be incorporation of better ways to identify document descriptors through syntactic and semantic front-end processing. The Kohonen-based SOM approach was considered difficult to use in all but one specialized case (the dynamic SOM created as part of the CancerLit prototype). This can probably be attributed to the fact that its associative organization does not match with the standard mental models (hierarchical and alphabetic) for information classification.
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Hu, Jian. "Interoperability of heterogeneous medical databases." Thesis, Heriot-Watt University, 1994. http://hdl.handle.net/10399/1358.
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Hu, Wenyang. "Ontology-based Web informatics system." [Gainesville, Fla.] : University of Florida, 2002. http://purl.fcla.edu/fcla/etd/UFE1000129.
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Thesis (M.E.)--University of Florida, 2002.<br>Title from title page of source document. Document formatted into pages; contains viii, 55 p.; also contains graphics. Includes vita. Includes bibliographical references.
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Song, Lihong. "Medical concept embedding with ontological representations." HKBU Institutional Repository, 2019. https://repository.hkbu.edu.hk/etd_oa/703.
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Learning representations of medical concepts from the Electronic Health Records (EHRs) has been shown effective for predictive analytics in healthcare. The learned representations are expected to preserve the semantic meanings of different medical concepts, which can be treated as features and thus benefit a variety of applications. Medical ontologies have also been explored to be integrated with the EHR data to further enhance the accuracy of various prediction tasks in healthcare. Most of the existing works assume that medical concepts under the same ontological category should share similar representations, which however does not always hold. In particular, the categorizations in the categorical medical ontologies were established with various factors being considered. Medical concepts even under the same ontological category may not follow similar occurrence patterns in the EHR data, leading to contradicting objectives for the representation learning. In addition, these existing works merely utilize the categorical ontologies. Actually, it has been noticed that ontologies containing multiple types of relations are also available. However, studies rarely make use of the diverse types of medical ontologies. In this thesis research, we propose three novel representation learning models for integrating the EHR data and medical ontologies for predictive analytics. To improve the interpretability and alleviate the conflicting objective issue between the EHR data and medical ontologies, we propose techniques to learn medical concepts embeddings with multiple ontological representations. To reduce the reliance on labeled data, we treat the co-occurrence statistics of clinical events as additional training signals, which help us learn good representations even with few labeled data. To leverage the various domain knowledge, we also consider multiple medical ontologies (CCS, ATC and SNOMED-CT) and propose corresponding attention mechanisms so as to take the best advantage of the medical ontologies with better interpretability. Our proposed models can achieve the final medical concept representations which align better with the EHR data. We conduct extensive experiments, and our empirical results prove the effectiveness of the proposed methods. Keywords: Bio/Medicine, Healthcare-AI, Electronic Health Record, Representation Learning, Machine Learning Applications
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Sætre, Rune. "GeneTUC: Natural Language Understanding in Medical Text." Doctoral thesis, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Department of Computer and Information Science, 2006. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:no:ntnu:diva-545.
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<p>Natural Language Understanding (NLU) is a 50 years old research field, but its application to molecular biology literature (BioNLU) is a less than 10 years old field. After the complete human genome sequence was published by Human Genome Project and Celera in 2001, there has been an explosion of research, shifting the NLU focus from domains like news articles to the domain of molecular biology and medical literature. BioNLU is needed, since there are almost 2000 new articles published and indexed every day, and the biologists need to know about existing knowledge regarding their own research. So far, BioNLU results are not as good as in other NLU domains, so more research is needed to solve the challenges of creating useful NLU applications for the biologists.</p><p>The work in this PhD thesis is a “proof of concept”. It is the first to show that an existing Question Answering (QA) system can be successfully applied in the hard BioNLU domain, after the essential challenge of unknown entities is solved. The core contribution is a system that discovers and classifies unknown entities and relations between them automatically. The World Wide Web (through Google) is used as the main resource, and the performance is almost as good as other named entity extraction systems, but the advantage of this approach is that it is much simpler and requires less manual labor than any of the other comparable systems.</p><p>The first paper in this collection gives an overview of the field of NLU and shows how the Information Extraction (IE) problem can be formulated with Local Grammars. The second paper uses Machine Learning to automatically recognize protein name based on features from the GSearch Engine. In the third paper, GSearch is substituted with Google, and the task in this paper is to extract all unknown names belonging to one of 273 biomedical entity classes, like genes, proteins, processes etc. After getting promising results with Google, the fourth paper shows that this approach can also be used to retrieve interactions or relationships between the named entities. The fifth paper describes an online implementation of the system, and shows that the method scales well to a larger set of entities.</p><p>The final paper concludes the “proof of concept” research, and shows that the performance of the original GeneTUC NLU system has increased from handling 10% of the sentences in a large collection of abstracts in 2001, to 50% in 2006. This is still not good enough to create a commercial system, but it is believed that another 40% performance gain can be achieved by importing more verb templates into GeneTUC, just like nouns were imported during this work. Work has already begun on this, in the form of a local Masters Thesis.</p>
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Zhang, Xiang. "Efficiency in Emergency medical service system : An analysis on information flow." Thesis, Växjö University, School of Mathematics and Systems Engineering, 2007. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:vxu:diva-1620.
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<p>In an information system which includes plenty of information services, we are always seeking a solution to enhance efficiency and reusability. Emergency medical service system is a classic information system using application integration in which the requirement of information flow transmissions is extremely necessary. We should always ensure this system is running in best condition with highest efficiency and reusability since the efficiency in the system directly affects human life.</p><p>The aim of this thesis is to analysis emergency medical system in both qualitative and quantitative ways. Another aim of this thesis is to suggest a method to judge the information flow through the analysis for the system efficiency and the correlations between information flow traffic and system applications.</p><p>The result is that system is a main platform integrated five information services. Each of them provides different unattached functions while they are all based on unified information resources. The system efficiency can be judged by a method called Performance Evaluation, the correlation can be judged by multi-factorial analysis of variance method.</p>
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Ellis, Jeremy Charles. "Medical informatics : the generic interchange of comprehensive health data." Thesis, University of Hull, 1999. http://hydra.hull.ac.uk/resources/hull:4636.
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The objective of this project was to study the area of generic transfer of comprehensive medical data.The work presented in this thesis had as its main premise the belief that generic transfer of comprehensive medical data will help towards the goal of better healthcare particularly in an environment of shared care. It studied the main methods of data transfer available at present, and as a result carried out an in depth review of one such method adopted by the National Health Service (NHS). Criticism of this method was made. These criticisms lead on to the development of an alternative method of generic data transfer based on an emerging European standard for the storage of medical data. This in turn led on to the consideration of data in legacy systems. Finally, an evaluation of the developed method was undertaken.
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Andrews, James Everett. "A bibliometric investigation of medical informatics : a communicative action perspective /." free to MU campus, to others for purchase, 2000. http://wwwlib.umi.com/cr/mo/fullcit?p9999269.
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Firoozbakht, Mohsen. "Regions-of-interest-driven medical image compression." Thesis, Kingston University, 2014. http://eprints.kingston.ac.uk/28208/.
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Advances in medical imaging technologies, particularly magnetic resonance imaging and multi-detector Computed Tomography (CT), have resulted in substantial increase in the size of datasets. In order to reduce the cost of storage and diagnostic analysis and transmission time without significant reduction in image quality, a state of the art image compression technique is required. We propose here a context based and regions of interest (ROI) based approach for the compression of 3D CT images and in particular vascular images, where a high spatial resolution and contrast sensitivity is required in specific areas. The methodology is developed based on the JPEG2000 standard to provide a variable level of compression in the (x,y) plane as well as in the z axis. The proposed lossy-to-lossless method compresses multiple ROIs depending on the degrees of clinical interest. High priority areas are assigned a higher precision (up to lossless compression) than other areas such as background. ROIs are annotated automatically. The method has been optimized and applied to the vascular images from CT angiography for peripheral arteries and compared with a standard medical image codec on 10 datasets regarding image quality and diagnostic performances. The average size of the compressed images can be reduced to 61, 60, 66, and 89 percent with respect to the lossless JP2K, Lossless JP3D, Lossless H.264, and original image respectively with no remarkable impairment for the diagnostic accuracy based on visual judgement of two radiologists.
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Bagherinakhjavanlo, Bashir. "Partial differential equations for medical image segmentation." Thesis, Kingston University, 2014. http://eprints.kingston.ac.uk/29993/.
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This study is concerned with image segmentation techniques using mathematical models based on elastic curves or surfaces defined within an image domain that can move under the influence of a defined energy. These active contour models use internal and external forces generated from curves or surfaces in 2D and 3D image data. The algorithms that measure these energies must cope with non-homogeneous objects and regions, low contrast boundaries and image noise. It investigates level sets, which employ an energy formulation defined by partial differential equations (PDEs), that are sensitive to weak boundaries yet are robust to noise whilst maintaining computational stability. The methodology is evaluated using medical imagery, which commonly suffer from high levels of noise, blur and exhibit weak boundaries between different types of adjacent tissue. An energy based on PDEs has been used to evolve an image contour from an initial guess using image forces derived from region properties to drive the search to locate the boundaries of the desired objects that includes the maximum and minimum curvature function to enable length shortening in the curve evolution. It is applied to both 2D and 3D CTA datasets for the segmentation of abdominal and thoracic aortic aneurysm (AAA&TAA). For some image data the methodology can be initialised automatically using a contour detected after intensity thresholding. Non-homogeneous regions require a manual initialisation that crosses the boundary between the aorta and thrombus. Sussman’s re-initialization has been used in the 3D algorithm to maintain stability in the evolving boundary, as a consequence of the re-formulation from the continuous to the discrete domain. A hybrid method is developed that combines a novel approach using region information (i.e. intensities inside and outside the object) and edge information, computed using a diffusion-based approach integrated into a level set formulation, to guide the initial curve to the object boundary by finding strong edges with local minima. Boundary information supports finding a local minimum length curve on evaluation and only examines data on the contour. Using Green’s theorem, region information is be used to address the boundary leakage problem, as it minimizes the energy related to the whole image data and the moving curve is stopped by strong gradients on the borders of objects. Finally, a Gabor filter has been integrated into the hybrid algorithm to enhance the image and support the detection of textured regions of interest. The method is evaluated on both synthetic and real image data and compared with the region-based methods of Chan-Vese and Li et al.
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Yip, Ying-ting, and 葉鎣婷. "A systematic review : cost-effectiveness of health informatics adoption for health care delivery." Thesis, The University of Hong Kong (Pokfulam, Hong Kong), 2013. http://hdl.handle.net/10722/193814.
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BACKGROUND: Health Information Technology (HIT) enhances patient safety, which can also help to reduce health care costs. When it is used to replace the paper-based records, it will alter the workflow of front line workers and facilitate the management of care. The data captured can be shared in a seamless manner throughout the whole patient care journey. Since a significant upfront investment is required in the implementation and the use of the Electronic Health Record (EHR), it is still recognized as one of the major barriers. Despite these factors, governments and private health care provider organizations are all moving to implement a myriad of HITs. Therefore, meaningful use (MU) is an important criterion when assessing HIT utilization. This study focuses on the review and synthesis of evidence relating to the cost and effectiveness of health informatics adoption for health care delivery. Taking these findings into account may increase the likelihood of successful and cost-effective HIT implementation.
METHODS: Literature searches of BMJ, Science Direct, and PubMed as well as a manual search for grey literature via Google scholar were performed. The inclusion criteria were any studies, both quantitative and qualitative, that describe the cost-effectiveness of informatics via any type of HIT used during the provision of health care services. English publications from 2003 to 2013 with any type of study setting were included. Through this search, nine articles were chosen for the final analysis.
RESULTS: Among the nine selected studies, eight of them concluded that the adoption of HIT may-be-cost-effective to health care delivery. One study found the adoption of HIT not effective. The studies did not provide sufficient and concrete evidence to prove cost-effectiveness of HIT adoption.
DISCUSSION: There is insufficient evidence to support the cost-effectiveness of HIT adoption. The cost data from these studies are not available. Data quality, system design, and physician behavior are other concern for MU of health informatics. Health care organization and governments should engage with the end-users (e.g. medical & paramedical personnel and patients) during system design (or selection), adaptation and implementation.
CONCLUSION: Stakeholders should be aware of the tradeoffs throughout the implementation process. HIT scope, design, development, implementation, and performance monitoring should be well planned right from the start. In the foreseeable future, formal economics evaluation reports of Cost-Effectiveness Analysis (CEA) should be compulsory for stakeholders investing in Health Information Technologies.<br>published_or_final_version<br>Public Health<br>Master<br>Master of Public Health
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Williams, Patricia A. "An investigation into the use of the internet for medical informatics." Thesis, Edith Cowan University, Research Online, Perth, Western Australia, 2001. https://ro.ecu.edu.au/theses/1031.
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The rapid evolution and popularity of the Internet technologies, and the World Wide Web, have resulted in unrestricted worldwide access to medical and health information. This has provided the medical profession with the ability to access up to date research more immediately than by traditional means, and has created the potential for advanced information collation. Also the availability of medical literature, previously difficult to obtain for the general public, is having an effect that is both a benefit and a burden to the medical profession. Whilst benefits exist in the use of the Internet in General Practice for clinical support, communication and education, there are also barriers to its inclusion in daily clinical practice. These include the issues of security, access availability, quality, time, research experience and Internet navigation familiarity. Questions remain as to whether or not the Internet can be used in General Practice efficiently, in order to provide a significant advantage over traditional information dissemination methods. This issue is also relevant for other primary health care providers such as pharmacists. In Australia, there has been a relatively slow adoption of both the technology and the use of the Internet for acquiring clinical and medical information. This thesis investigates the current issues surrounding the use of the Internet in general practice and pharmacy in Western Australia. The underlying assumption that the Internet is a useful tool for such information retrieval is examined in terms of useability and usefulness in clinical practice. Further the attitudes to the use of the Internet technology as an effective medium of information delivery were sought.
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Eapen, Arun George. "Application of Data mining in Medical Applications." Thesis, University of Waterloo, 2004. http://hdl.handle.net/10012/772.
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Data mining is a relatively new field of research whose major objective is to acquire knowledge from large amounts of data. In medical and health care areas, due to regulations and due to the availability of computers, a large amount of data is becoming available. On the one hand, practitioners are expected to use all this data in their work but, at the same time, such a large amount of data cannot be processed by humans in a short time to make diagnosis, prognosis and treatment schedules. A major objective of this thesis is to evaluate data mining tools in medical and health care applications to develop a tool that can help make timely and accurate decisions.
Two medical databases are considered, one for describing the various tools and the other as the case study. The first database is related to breast cancer and the second is related to the minimum data set for mental health (MDS-MH). The breast cancer database consists of 10 attributes and the MDS-MH dataset consists of 455 attributes.
As there are a number of data mining algorithms and tools available we consider only a few tools to evaluate on these applications and develop classification rules that can be used in prediction. Our results indicate that for the major case study, namely the mental health problem, over 70 to 80% accurate results are possible.
A further extension of this work is to make available classification rules in mobile devices such as PDAs. Patient information is directly inputted onto the PDA and the classification of these inputted values takes place based on the rules stored on the PDA to provide real time assistance to practitioners.
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Inam, Ul Haq Muhammad, and Rafiq Ahmed. "The implementation problems of Medical Information Systems." Thesis, Högskolan i Borås, Institutionen Handels- och IT-högskolan, 2011. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:hb:diva-20447.
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The use of medical information systems is now prevailing in the whole healthcare environment where the focus is on reducing clinical errors and supporting healthcare professionals in their routine tasks. Hospitals adopt medical information systems to facilitate their healthcare staff in providing efficient services to patients. Studies show that most of the time these systems cannot deliver according to their functional capacities due to certain implementation problems. In this research, we have indicated different implementation problems, their root causes and suggested proper approaches for solving these issues. In the textual analysis, we examined different technical, psychological and social problems that may arise during the implementation process. These theoretical findings have been validated through questionnaires and interviews with doctors, nurses, technicians and people involved in the development of medical information systems. The companies that are providing implementation services are also consulted to validate the theoretical facts. The results show that implementation problems are social and psychological rather than technical, so these problems should be solved with interpersonal, psychological and social skills. The focus of the implementation process should be on the social, psychological and technical effects to avoid any conflict. Reasonable user involvement in the decision making process, motivation and proper training reduces many implementation issues automatically. It is concluded from empirical results that development and implementation teams should have reasonable medical domain knowledge to diminish future implementation and maintenance hazards. The theoretical and empirical results show that data security issues are psychological as well as technical and should be dealt with by high priority.
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Gregory, Judith. "Sorcerer's apprentice : creating the electronic health record, re-inventing medical records and patient care /." Diss., Connect to a 24 p. preview or request complete full text in PDF format. Access restricted to UC campuses, 2000. http://wwwlib.umi.com/cr/ucsd/fullcit?p9992380.
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May, Kyle P. "Internet disseminated medical information an investigation of three regulatory policy tools /." Fairfax, VA : George Mason University, 2008. http://hdl.handle.net/1920/3350.
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Thesis (Ph.D.)--George Mason University, 2008.<br>Vita: p. 210. Thesis director: David M. Hart. Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Public Policy. Title from PDF t.p. (viewed Jan. 11, 2009). Includes bibliographical references (p. 196-209). Also issued in print.
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Steiner, Bridget Anne. "Electronic medical record implementation in nursing practice a literature review of the factors of success /." Thesis, Montana State University, 2009. http://etd.lib.montana.edu/etd/2009/steiner/SteinerB0509.pdf.
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This is a review of the current literature to discern what factors need to be present in an electronic medical record (EMR) implementation in order for it to be successful for nurses. An extensive literature search was performed by using databases CINAHL, MEDLINE, and Health Reference Center for primary sources of research that specifically addressed EMR implementation and nursing. A coding scheme was developed and applied to each article for analysis. It was found that fit of the EMR with nurse functions, education, and positive nurse attitude were the three most common factors associated with successful EMR implementation for nurses. Lack of computer system quality, lack of fit of the EMR with nurse functions, and time requirements of its use were most commonly associated with lack of success.
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Owolabi, Kehinde Aboyami. "Access and use of clinical informatics among medical doctors in selected teaching hospitals in Nigeria and South Africa." Thesis, University of Zululand, 2017. http://hdl.handle.net/10530/1529.
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A dissertation submitted to the Faculty of Arts in fulfilment of the requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy (Library and Information Studies) in the Department of Information Studies at the University Of Zululand, 2017<br>This study examined access and use of clinical informatics among medical doctors at University College Hospital, Nigeria and King Edward VIII Hospital, South Africa. The specific objectives of the study were to explain the purposes of using clinical informatics; determine the benefits of using clinical informatics in the selected teaching hospitals; ascertain the availability of clinical informatics infrastructure in the selected teaching hospitals; identify the clinical informatics facilities that are accessible to medical doctors in the selected teaching hospitals; determine the factors that influence the behavioural intention to use clinical informatics by medical doctors in the selected teaching hospitals; determine the policies that guide the effective accessibility and utilisation of clinical informatics among medical doctors in the selected teaching hospitals; and investigate the challenges that faced both the access to and the use of clinical informatics among medical doctors in the selected teaching hospitals. The study adopted the post-positivist paradigm which combines both qualitative and quantitative research methods. The study largely used a survey design. The sample for the study was drawn from medical doctors in two purposively selected teaching hospitals in Nigeria and South Africa. The teaching hospitals were King Edward V111 hospital, Durban, South Africa and University College Hospital, Ibadan, Nigeria. The two teaching hospitals were selected because they belong to the first generation of teaching hospitals in Nigeria and South Africa, among other reasons. It was believed that they would be well established in terms of funding towards infrastructure and human development in their respective countries. Convenience sampling was used to select the respondents for the study. The questionnaire was administered to 413 medical doctors, 258 (63%) of whom returned the questionnaire. Interviews were also conducted with the heads of the ICT units at the University College Hospital in Ibadan, Nigeria, and King Edward VIII Hospital in Durban, South Africa. The quantitative data aspect of the study was analysed using descriptive statistics and Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS), while the qualitative aspect of the data was analysed through the use of qualitative contents analysis. The study was guided by the Unified theory of acceptance and use of technology (UTAUT). The essence of using this theory is to identify the factors that influence the use of clinical informatics. The finding of the study reveals that there was an association between the demographic variables and the use of clinical informatics. It was established that there was a significant association between the medical department and the use of electronic medical records. An assessment of the socio-demographic characteristics and the use of the Clinical Decision Support System revealed that there was a significant association between the years of medical practice and the use of Clinical Decision Support System. The finding also revealed that social demographic variables such as age, years of practice and position were all significant related with the use of diagnostic image archiving. Furthermore, the surveyed medical doctors stated that their main purpose of using clinical informatics is for medical diagnosis. It was also discovered that there is association between the teaching hospitals and the use of clinical informatics for knowledge sharing. In addition, clinical informatics was found to influence the spirit of team work amongst the medical doctors through knowledge sharing with their professional colleagues and their medical students. Similarly, there were association between the teaching hospitals treatment of patients and effective healthcare delivery. In addition, the major benefit of using clinical informatics in the two hospitals was to reduce medical errors.
The most available clinical informatics tools in the selected teaching hospitals were the Diagnosis Image Archiving and Clinical Decision Support System. Performance expectancy and effort expectancy were identified as the factors from the UTAUT that influenced the medical doctors’ behavioural intention to use clinical informatics resources in the selected teaching hospitals. The non-availability of clinical informatics resources was identified as the main challenge facing the effective access to and use of clinical informatics. In addition, the two hospitals relied on the ICT policies of other institutions and did not have their own ICT policies, which was problematic.
The study concluded that the clinical informatics environments in the two teaching hospitals are inadequate and there is poor access to clinical informatics resources among medical doctors in the selected teaching hospitals. Major recommendations of the study include the need to establish ICT policies and increase investment in clinical informatics resources at the surveyed teaching hospitals in order to promote effective and value-based healthcare delivery. In addition, the hospital management should create awareness on the importance and benefits of clinical informatics particularly for the medical doctors through informal and continuing education and training such as workshops and short courses. Moreover, the hospital managements need to partner with relevant stakeholders such as government, corporate bodies, and departments of health. This is for the provision of adequate and suitable environment to support the access and use of clinical informatics. Further studies on the various types of health informatics such as nursing informatics, pharmacy informatics and veterinary informatics are recommended. It is also suggested that the study should be extended to other regions of Africa. The study is significant and makes tangible contributions to technology acceptance and use in clinical medicine from developing country contexts such as Nigeria and South Africa giving the increasing role of information and communication technology in diagnosis, prescription, treatment, monitoring and overall management of patient care in an environment characterized by complex diseases. The study has the potential to inform policy, practises, and also contribute to this research in the general area of social information in Africa.
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Richards, Janise Elaine. "Public health informatics : a consensus on core competencies /." Digital version accessible at:, 2000. http://wwwlib.umi.com/cr/utexas/main.
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Huang, Huan. "Development of a conceptual graph based information retrieval model for medical question databases /." free to MU campus, to others for purchase, 2004. http://wwwlib.umi.com/cr/mo/fullcit?p1421143.
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Vijaykumar, Santosh. "What's the quality of breast cancer information you read online? a comparative analysis of breast cancer information quality in commercial and nonprofit websites /." Diss., Columbia, Mo. : University of Missouri-Columbia, 2005. http://hdl.handle.net/10355/4278.
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Thesis (M.A.)--University of Missouri-Columbia, 2005.<br>The entire dissertation/thesis text is included in the research.pdf file; the official abstract appears in the short.pdf file (which also appears in the research.pdf); a non-technical general description, or public abstract, appears in the public.pdf file. Title from title screen of research.pdf file viewed on (January 10, 2007) Includes bibliographical references.
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Scandurra, Isabella. "Building Usability into Health Informatics : Development and Evaluation of Information Systems for Shared Homecare." Doctoral thesis, Uppsala : Acta universitatis Upsaliensis, 2007. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:uu:diva-8403.
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Chang, Andrew Yee. "A web accessible clinical patient information networked system." CSUSB ScholarWorks, 2006. https://scholarworks.lib.csusb.edu/etd-project/2980.
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Developed with the intention to make the patient data storage system in the clinical outpatient area more efficient, this system stores all pertinent and relevant patient data such as lab results, patient history and X-ray images. The system is accessible via the internet as well as operable over a local area network (LAN). The intended audience for this program is essentially the clinical staff (e.g., physicians, nursing staff, secretarial staff). The computer program was developed using Java Server Pages (JSP) and utilizes the Oracle 9i database.
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Morton, Mary Elizabeth Wiedenbeck Susan McCain Katherine Wootton. "Use and acceptance of an electronic health record : factors affecting physician attitudes /." Philadelphia, Pa. : Drexel University, 2008. http://hdl.handle.net/1860/2905.
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Chen, Yunan Atwood Michael E. "Context-centered design : bridging the gap between designing and understanding /." Philadelphia, Pa. : Drexel University, 2008. http://hdl.handle.net/1860/2978.
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Sabbagh, A. O. "A novel model for managing health informatics in Saudi Arabia." Thesis, Coventry University, 2015. http://curve.coventry.ac.uk/open/items/6a19f00c-e199-49e6-b0c6-4e71d853fa35/1.
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Application of Health Informatics (HI) is becoming more pervasive in the Saudi Arabian health organisations (SAHOs) with the aim of exploiting its potential for better healthcare delivery. Yet, to date, the management of HI has not been fully digested in the Saudi health environment. Therefore, adoption of imported models has become a common practice for managing HI. Consequently, most implemented systems fall short of meeting objectives or tackling key existing issues. The aim of the study is to develop a model for HI management that not only deals with key prevailing issues but also should be compatible with the Saudi Arabian health environment. The research contends that the key to success in exploiting the potential of HI is the use of appropriate local models that fully integrate with the Saudi Arabian health environment. The research design was mainly guided by pragmatic philosophy which incorporated both quantitative and qualitative research. It was inductive in nature and used a field research methodology to accomplish the research objectives. Empirical data was collected via questionnaires and interviews in the collaborating health organisations. Literature review, data analyses of the questionnaires and interviews yielded the initial framework for the Health Informatics Management Model (HIMM). A first round evaluation of the HIMM was conducted yielding a revised version. Later, data was also gathered from participants in a second round of evaluating the HIMM. The second round was to reassess the compatibility of HIMM with the Saudi Arabian health organisations, and to update the model in order to match the current application of HI in these organisations. The analysis of the data gleaned from the second stage evaluation yielded a revised (and final) HIMM, contemplated by participants. Based on the above empirical data, the research study introduces the HIMM, the first holistic and systematic HI framework that should enable the Saudi health providers and managers to better comprehend the multi-faceted perspectives that form the HI management paradigm, and guide them in its management. It can allow them to decide how best to manage HI projects in a way that ensures an optimum use of HI resources for effective and efficient delivery of healthcare and services. This work is of considerable utility in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States, where HI management and its application are regarded as an area of high priority.
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Philip, Nada Y. "Medical quality of service for optimized ultrasound streaming in wireless robotic tele-ultrasonography system." Thesis, Kingston University, 2008. http://eprints.kingston.ac.uk/20312/.
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Mobile healthcare (m-health) is a new paradigm that brings together the evolution of emerging wireless communications and network technologies with the concept of 'connected healthcare' anytime and anywhere. There are two critical issues facing the successful deployment of m-health applications from the wireless communications perspectives. First, wireless connectivity issues and mobility requirements of real-time bandwidth demanding m-health applications. Second, the Quality of Service (QoS) issues from the healthcare perspective and their required levels to guarantee robust and clinically acceptable healthcare services. This thesis consider the concept of medical QoS (m-QoS) issues for typical bandwidth demanding m-health application (tele-ultrasound streaming) in 3G and 3.5G wireless environments. Specifically this thesis introduces a new concept of m-QoS that provide a sub-category of quality of services from the m-health perspective. A wireless robotic tele-ultrasonography system is adopted in this research as the m-health application. Accordingly the m-QoS metrics and its functional bounds for this m-health application are defined. To validate this concept a new optimal video streaming rate control policy is proposed based on the Q-Iearning approach to deliver the ultrasound images over 3G and 3.5G environments. To achieve these objectives an end-to-end architecture for streaming M-JPEG compressed ultrasound video over 3G and 3.5G communication network is developed. Through this a client-server test bed is developed to capture the ultrasound images and adaptively varying its frame rate and the quality and send to the other end. The new rate control algorithm was implemented via this test bed. This thesis shows the performance analysis of the proposed rate control algorithm in terms of achieving the defined m-QoS over 3G and 3.5G wireless connections. In collaboration with medical expert in ultrasonography field, subjective image analysis are also carried out to validate the quality of the processed images.
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Ogundaini, Oluwamayowa Oaikhena. "Adoption and use of electronic healthcare information systems to support clinical care in public hospitals of the Western Cape, South Africa." Thesis, Cape Peninsula University of Technology, 2016. http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.11838/2417.
Full textAbstract:
Thesis (MTech (Information Technology))--Cape Peninsula University of Technology, 2016.<br>In the Western Cape, South Africa, despite the prospective benefits that e-Health information systems (e-Health IS) offer to support the healthcare sector; there are limitations in terms of
usability, functionality and peculiar socio-technical factors. Thus, healthcare professionals do
not make the most use of the implemented e-Health IS. Unfortunately, explanations remain
tentative and unclear, yet non-usage of the e-Health IS defeats the objectives of its adoption,
in the sense that the plan to improve and deliver quality healthcare service in the public
sector may not be achieved as envisaged. The aim of the study was to acquire explanations
to the causes of the limitations regarding the adoption and, particularly, the use (or non-use)
of e-Health IS by clinical staff in the public healthcare institutions in South Africa.
The choice of research approach was informed by the research problem, objectives, and the
main research question. By the reasons of the subjective and socio-technical nature of the
phenomenon, a deductive approach was adopted for this investigation. The nominalist
ontology and interpretivist epistemology positions were taken by the researcher as a lens to
conduct this research; which informed a qualitative methodology for this investigation. The
purposive sampling technique was used to identify the appropriate participants from different
hospital levels consisting of Hospital Administrative staff, and Clinical staff (Clinicians and
Nurses) of relative experiences in their clinical units. Subsequently, the Unified Theory of
Acceptance and Use of Technology (UTAUT) and content analysis technique were used to
contextualize, simplify, and analysis the text data transcripts. The findings indicate that healthcare professionals have a high level of awareness and
acceptance to use implemented e-Health IS. There are positive perceptions on the expected
outcomes, that e-Health IS would improve processes and enhance healthcare services
delivery in the public healthcare sector. Also, findings indicate that social influence plays a
vital role especially on the willingness of individuals (or groups); as the clinical staff are
influenced by their colleagues despite the facilitating conditions provided by the hospital
management. Further, findings indicate that it is somewhat problematic to maintain balance
in running a parallel paper-electronic system in the hospital environment.
Hence, the core factors that influence successful adoption and use of e-Health IS include;
willingness of an individual (or group) to accept and use a technology, the performance
expectancy, social influence among professionals in the healthcare scenery and adequate
facilitating conditions. In summary, it is recommended that there should be an extensive
engagement inclusive of all respective stakeholders involved in the adoption processes. This
would ensure that e-Health IS are designed to meet both practical organizational and clinical
needs (and expectations) with respect to the hospital contexts.
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Stokes, Todd Hamilton. "Development of a visualization and information management platform in translational biomedical informatics." Diss., Georgia Institute of Technology, 2009. http://hdl.handle.net/1853/33967.
Full textAbstract:
Translational Biomedical Informatics (TBMI) is an emerging discipline expanding beyond traditional bioinformatics, with a focus on developing computational technologies for real-world biomedical practice. The goal of my Ph.D. research is to address a few key challenges in TBI, including: (1) the high quality and reproducibility required by medical applications when processing high throughput data, (2) the need for knowledge management solutions that allow molecular data to be handled and evaluated by researchers, regulators, and doctors collectively, (3) the need for near real-time, efficient access to decision-oriented visualizations of integrated data and data processing results, and (4) the need for an integrated solution that can evolve as medical consensus evolves, without requiring retraining, overhaul or replacement. This dissertation resulted in the development and adoption of concrete web-based application deliverables in regular use by bioinformaticians, clinicians, biologists and nanotechnologists. These include: the Chip Artifact Correction (caCORRECT) web site and grid services, the ArrayWiki community microarray repository, and the SimpleVisGrid visualization grid services (including eGOMiner, nanoDRIVE, PathwayVis and SphingoVisGrid).
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Hägglund, Maria. "Sharing is Caring : Integrating Health Information Systems to Support Patient-Centred Shared Homecare." Doctoral thesis, Uppsala universitet, Institutionen för medicinska vetenskaper, 2009. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:uu:diva-9527.
Full textAbstract:
In the light of an ageing society with shrinking economic resources, deinstitutionalization of elderly care is a general trend. As a result, homecare is increasing, and increasingly shared between different health and social care organizations. To provide a holistic overview about the patient care process, i.e. to be patient-centred, shared homecare needs to be integrated. This requires improved support for information sharing and cooperation between different actors, such as care professionals, patients and their relatives. The research objectives of this thesis are therefore to study information and communication needs for patient-centered shared homecare, to explore how integrated information and communication technology (ICT) can support information sharing, and to analyze how current standards for continuity of care and semantic interoperability meet requirements of patient-centered shared homecare. An action research approach, characterized by an iterative cycle, an emphasis on change and close collaboration with practitioners, patients and their relatives, was used. Studying one specific homecare setting closely, intersection points between involved actors and specific needs for information sharing were identified and described as shared information objects. An integration architecture making shared information objects available through integration of existing systems was designed and implemented. Mobile virtual health record (VHR) applications thereby enable a seamless flow of information between involved actors. These applications were tested and validated in the OLD@HOME-project. Moreover, the underlying information model for a shared care plan was mapped against current standards. Some important discrepancies were identified between these results and current standards for continuity of care, stressing the importance of evaluating standardized models against requirements of evolving healthcare contexts. In conclusion, this thesis gives important insights into the needs and requirements of shared homecare, enabling a shift towards patient-centered homecare through mobile access to aggregated information from current feeder systems and documentation at the point of need.
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Lei, Xin. "Analyzing “Design + Medical” Collaboration Using Participatory Action Research (PAR): A Case Study of the Oxygen Saturation Data Display Project at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center." University of Cincinnati / OhioLINK, 2015. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=ucin1427983695.
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Frunza, Oana Magdalena. "Personalized Medicine through Automatic Extraction of Information from Medical Texts." Thèse, Université d'Ottawa / University of Ottawa, 2012. http://hdl.handle.net/10393/22724.
Full textAbstract:
The wealth of medical-related information available today gives rise to a multidimensional source of knowledge. Research discoveries published in prestigious venues, electronic-health records data, discharge summaries, clinical notes, etc., all represent important medical information that can assist in the medical decision-making process. The challenge that comes with accessing and using such vast and diverse sources of data stands in the ability to distil and extract reliable and relevant information. Computer-based tools that use natural language processing and machine learning techniques have proven to help address such challenges. This current work proposes automatic reliable solutions for solving tasks that can help achieve a personalized-medicine, a medical practice that brings together general medical knowledge and case-specific medical information. Phenotypic medical observations, along with data coming from test results, are not enough when assessing and treating a medical case. Genetic, life-style, background and environmental data also need to be taken into
account in the medical decision process. This thesis’s goal is to prove that natural
language processing and machine learning techniques represent reliable solutions for
solving important medical-related problems.
From the numerous research problems that need to be answered when implementing
personalized medicine, the scope of this thesis is restricted to four, as follows:
1. Automatic identification of obesity-related diseases by using only textual clinical
data;
2. Automatic identification of relevant abstracts of published research to be used for
building systematic reviews;
3. Automatic identification of gene functions based on textual data of published medical abstracts;
4. Automatic identification and classification of important medical relations between medical concepts in clinical and technical data. This thesis investigation on finding automatic solutions for achieving a personalized medicine through information identification and extraction focused on individual specific problems that can be later linked in a puzzle-building manner. A diverse representation technique that follows a divide-and-conquer methodological approach shows to be the most reliable solution for building automatic models that solve the above mentioned
tasks. The methodologies that I propose are supported by in-depth research experiments
and thorough discussions and conclusions.
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Liu, Chaomei. "Traditional Chinese medical clinic system." CSUSB ScholarWorks, 2004. https://scholarworks.lib.csusb.edu/etd-project/2517.
Full textAbstract:
The Chinese Medical Clinic System is designed to help acupuncturists and assistants record and store information. This system can maintain and schedule appointments and view patient diagnoses effectively. The system will be implemented on a desktop PC connected to the internet to facilitate the acupuncturists record of information.
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Chi, Chih-Lin Street William N. "Medical decision support systems based on machine learning." Iowa City : University of Iowa, 2009. http://ir.uiowa.edu/etd/283.
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Moncur, Wendy. "A model for the provision of adaptive eHealth information across the personal social network." Thesis, University of Aberdeen, 2011. http://digitool.abdn.ac.uk:80/webclient/DeliveryManager?pid=167015.
Full textAbstract:
This thesis describes research into the facilitation of mediated communication of health updates and support needs across the social network, on behalf of individuals experiencing acute or chronic health problems. This led to the user-centred design, development and evaluation of a prototype software tool. Investigatory applied research was conducted with the parents of sick newborn infants who were (or had previously been) cared for in a Neonatal Unit, and their social networks of family, friends, colleagues and neighbours. The thesis makes contributions to knowledge within Social Networks, Health Informatics, Adaptive Systems and User Modelling. The user-centred research was conducted using a Grounded Theory approach, progressively focussing on developing themes. An iterative approach was taken to evaluation of the resulting theory. In the Social Networks domain, a novel, intuitive mechanism for capturing the membership and structure of an individual’s personal social network has been defined and developed, grounded in the work of evolutionary anthropologist Robin Dunbar. Use of the highly visual mechanism requires low levels of literacy and computer skills. It is cross-culturally applicable, and makes no prior assumptions about an individual’s relationships. In the domains of Health Informatics, Adaptive Systems and User Modelling, a model has been defined for adaptive information sharing across the personal social network. This model provides a number of new insights about information sharing choices made by an individual experiencing a health crisis (the ego) and their supporters (alters).
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Koopman, Bevan Raymond. "Semantic search as inference : applications in health informatics." Thesis, Queensland University of Technology, 2014. https://eprints.qut.edu.au/71385/1/Bevan_Koopman_Thesis.pdf.
Full textAbstract:
This thesis developed new search engine models that elicit the meaning behind the words found in documents and queries, rather than simply matching keywords. These new models were applied to searching medical records: an area where search is particularly challenging yet can have significant benefits to our society.
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Li, Kit-ling Carol, and 李潔寧. "m-Health smartphone applications on chronic disease monitoring : development and regulatory considerations." Thesis, The University of Hong Kong (Pokfulam, Hong Kong), 2014. http://hdl.handle.net/10722/206932.
Full textAbstract:
Introduction: The market for chronic disease management apps for patients is growing from year to year. However, policy and regulation of app use for medical purposes in Asia Pacific are not developed. Methods: 1) A systematic review of randomized-controlled trials of diabetes management apps for patients are assessed as to determine whether using the app (intervention group) leads to significant reductions in HbA1c levels ; 2) A comparison of paid and free apps based on number of group functions between Apple iTunes App Store and Google Play for Android. Results: 1) A reduction in HbA1c in both the intervention (m-Health) and control (usual care) group, although two studies identified the changes as statistically insignificant; 2) Apple iTunes App store included 95 free diabetes management apps for patients and 86 paid apps at an average cost of $19.91. Google Play offered 80 free apps and 31 paid apps at an average cost of $4.31. The largest HbA1c reductions could be found when clinical, social, behavioural, and affective factors are taken into account in the app’s supporting system (e.g. WellDoc™ System (WDS). Discussion: There is some evidence to suggest that mobile apps for diabetes management for patients show reductions in HbA1c similar to usual care. In Hong Kong, some progress has been made regarding the promotion of the use of m-Health for the elderly and disabled, but policies on app development, approval, and regulation are absent. Future expansion of ICT may consider m-Health for chronic disease management based on international lessons on medical device and medical apps guidelines.<br>published_or_final_version<br>Public Health<br>Master<br>Master of Public Health
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Mackin, Neil. "Development of an expert system for planning orthodontic treatment." Thesis, University of Bristol, 1992. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.238890.
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Van, der Watt Cecil Clifford. "Design considerations of a semantic metadata repository in home-based healthcare." Thesis, Cape Peninsula University of Technology, 2011. http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.11838/2300.
Full textAbstract:
Thesis (MTech (Information Technology))--Cape Peninsula University of Technology, 2011.<br>The research was conducted as part of a socio-tech initiative undertaken at the Cape
Peninsula University of Technology. The socio-tech initiative overall focus was on
addressing issues faced by rural and under-resourced communities in South Africa,
specifically looking at Home-Based Healthcare (HBHC) primarily in the Western Cape.
As research into the HBHC context in rural and under-resourced communities
continued numerous issues around data and data-elements came to light. These data
issues were especially prevalent in relation to the various paper forms being used by
the HBHC initiatives that attempt to deliver care in these communities. The
communities have the tendency to suffer from poor access to formal healthcare
services and healthcare facilities. The data issues were primarily in terms of how data was defines and used within the
HBHC initiatives. Within the HBHC initiatives that cater for rural and under-resourced
communities there was a clear prevalence of paper-based systems, and a very low
penetration of IT-based solution. Because similar and related data-elements are used
throughout the paper forms and within different context these data-elements are
inconsistently used and presented. The paper forms further obfuscate these
inconsistencies as the paper forms regularly change due to internal and external
factors. When these paper forms are changed date elements are added or removed
without the changes to the underlying ontologies being considered.
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Ölvingson, Christina. "On development of information systems with GIS functionality in public health informatics : a requirements engineering approach /." Linköping : Univ, 2003. http://www.bibl.liu.se/liupubl/disp/disp2003/tek823s.pdf.
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Suwarno, Neihl Omar 1963. "A computer based data acquisition and analysis system for a cardiovascular research laboratory." Thesis, The University of Arizona, 1989. http://hdl.handle.net/10150/558111.
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Erdil, Nadiye Özlem. "Systems analysis of electronic health record adoption in the U.S. healthcare system." Diss., Online access via UMI:, 2009.
Find full textAbstract:
Thesis (Ph. D.)--State University of New York at Binghamton, Thomas J. Watson School of Engineering and Applied Science, Department of Systems Science and Industrial Engineering, 2009.<br>Includes bibliographical references.
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Samusodza, Chengetai Rosemary. "The potential of mHealth technologies for maternal health-care services : a case of selected public hospitals' maternal units in Zimbabwe." Thesis, Cape Peninsula University of Technology, 2016. http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.11838/2425.
Full textAbstract:
Thesis (MTech (Information Technology))--Cape Peninsula University of Technology, 2016.<br>Zimbabwe has a fairly developed health-care delivery system that is served by public and private hospitals at district, provincial and national level. The public health-care system is the largest provider of health-care services and caters for the majority of the population but this is done in a resource-restricted context, typical of a developing context. In this context, this research sought to establish the potential of mHealth Technologies in Zimbabwe’s maternal health sector using Parirenyatwa and Harare hospitals as case studies. The reviewed body of knowledge, which was largely a comparative assessment of mHealth technology adoption in developing countries, indicated that the full adoption of the prevailing eHealth strategy in Zimbabwe remains hamstrung by the slow pace of policy implementation. This is a qualitative study and data was collected with unstructured interviews. Purposive and snowball sampling were used to recruit the participants. The gathered data was analyzed through content and thematic analysis. Four broad themes emerged from the primary data collected during the interviews and these include: trends in information dissemination in Zimbabwe’s Public Health System; information needs for expectant women and midwives; the prevalence of ICT use in Zimbabwe’s Public Health System, and mobile technology use in the maternal health sector in Zimbabwe. The research was able to establish that while there is a high proliferation of smartphone use among most expectant women, this has not translated into their use for health information-related purposes.
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Lindblad, Erik. "Designing a framework for simulating radiology information systems." Thesis, Linköping University, Department of Computer and Information Science, 2008. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:liu:diva-15211.
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<p>In this thesis, a very flexible framework for simulating RIS is designed to beused for Infobroker testing. Infobroker is an application developed by MawellSvenska AB that connects RIS and PACS to achieve interoperability by enablingimage and journal data transmission between radiology sites. To put the project in context, the field of medical informatics, RIS and PACS systems and common protocols and standards are explored. A proof-of-concept implementation of the proposed design shows its potential and verifies that it works. The thesis concludes that a more specialized approach is preferred.</p>
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Dunn, Kristina Ann. "Nursing Informatics Competency Program." ScholarWorks, 2017. https://scholarworks.waldenu.edu/dissertations/3985.
Full textAbstract:
Currently, C Hospital lacks a standardized nursing informatics competency program to validate nurses' skills and knowledge in using electronic medical records (EMRs). At the study locale, the organization is about to embark on the implementation of a new, more comprehensive EMR system. All departments will be required to use the new EMR, unlike the current policy that allows some areas to still document on paper. The Institute of Medicine, National League of Nursing, and American Association of Colleges of Nursing support and recommend that information technology be an essential core competency for nurses. Evidence of the need for nursing informatic competencies was found through a literature search using CINHAL, Proquest Nursing, Medline, and Pubmed search lines. Concepts searched were competencies, nursing informatics, health information technology, electronic health record, information technology literacy, nursing education, information technology training, and curriculum. The Staggers Nursing Computer Experience Questionnaire was distributed to 300 nurses practicing within the hospital setting to obtain baseline data on current nursing computer knowledge and skill level. This validated tool was created by Nancy Staggers in 1994 and used in other process improvement efforts similar to this one. The assumption was that nursing competency levels with computers were varied through the hospital. The data obtained from the questionnaire, through Zoho Survey tool, confirmed this assumption and were used to help create the education, support, and competency plan for the future. Data was analyzed through the built-in reports and interactive charts that the Zoho survey tool provides. The new EMR and all the new processes that come with it will be the framework of nursing care. Having competent nurses in the use of the EMR will optimize the quality of patient care delivered.
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Razaak, Manzoor. "Quality evaluation of medical ultrasound videos for e-health and telemedicine applications." Thesis, Kingston University, 2015. http://eprints.kingston.ac.uk/35852/.
Full textAbstract:
The advancements in multimedia communication technologies have enabled an increased implementation of telemedicine and e-health application for healthcare services. In parallel, advanced imaging methods have facilitated increasing reliance on medical images and videos for patient diagnosis. The high data speeds achieved by current communication technologies enables reliable transmission of medical videos for diagnosis and education purposes in telemedicine applications. The necessary process of video compression, prior to transmission, and communication channel constraints may occasionally impact the quality of the medical video received after transmission. Thus, to verify the reliability of the received video, quality evaluation is necessary. However, the present approaches used for medical video quality evaluation have limitations in addressing the contextual requirements of medical videos. The research work presented in this thesis addresses quality evaluation of medical ultrasound videos for telemedicine and e-health applications. The studies presented in the thesis include a subjective quality assessment study of medical ultrasound videos compressed via the High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) standard and the validation of the performance of state-of-the-art video quality metrics using the subjective cores of medical experts. Further, the rate-distortion and rate-quality performance of HEVC is analysed for the compression of medical ultrasound videos. A video quality metric, Cardiac Ultrasound Quality Index (CUQI), for cardiac ultrasound videos is proposed that considers the motion and edge features of cardiac videos for quality evaluation. The proposed metric assessment closely agrees with the subjective assessment of medical experts. Finally, a content-aware packet scheduling approach for transmission of medical ultrasound videos over Long Term Evolution (LTE) wireless network is presented. The scheduling approach employs a utility function based on the temporal complexity of the medical ultrasound videos and results in improving the received video quality. The research outcomes presented in the thesis indicate that developing quality evaluation approaches according to the contextual requirements of the medical video modality could enable overcoming the limitations of standard quality evaluation approaches.
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Zhang, Yu. "Affective-discursive practices in online medical consultations in China :emotional and empathic acts, identity positions, and power relations." HKBU Institutional Repository, 2020. https://repository.hkbu.edu.hk/etd_oa/800.
Full textAbstract:
It is widely acknowledged that patients' emotional expressions and doctors' empathic responses play a key role in providing satisfactory healthcare services and improving doctor-patient relationships. While such affective aspect of medical consultation discourse has been studied in different fields of research with the focus of examining medical consultations that occur in face-to-face settings, this area is extremely under-researched in the field of linguistics, particularly in the non-western context and the online space. While online medical consultation (OMC) has ushered in the new era of e-communication around the beginning of this century, discourse-related research on OMC is still in its infancy and studies on the affective dimension of the OMC discourse in non-western sites are, to my best knowledge, apparently absent in the literature. As China has seen a significant increase in the use of OMC platforms, studying OMC discourse in the China context is not only important but vital. With the support of the Chinese government's "Internet Plus Healthcare" policy issued in 2018, the reliance on the online mode of medical consultation will be further strengthened and the future of OMC service in China will remain promising. In order to have a better understanding of the affective aspect of OMC discourse, this thesis explores the online interaction between doctors and e-patients (including patients' caregivers) from a poststructuralist discourse analysis perspective. The data for this study consists of 300 text-based one-to-one instant messaging OMC cases collected from three popular OMC websites used in China. Each OMC case contains e-patients' emotional expression and doctors' empathic response. The data are analysed by the approach of computer-mediated discourse analysis in terms of two dimensions: the textual dimension and the social practice dimension. At the textual level, the study identifies indirect negative emotional acts by e-patients and empathic acts by doctors (which constitute the affective practice); it also examines the interactional discursive features involved in the affective practice. At the social practice level, it explores the discursive positions of e-patients and doctors within the affective practice context and the power relations that are reflected in the identity positionings. This study finds that the text-based OMC affective practice is rich in various types of emotional expressions and different ways of manifesting empathy, some of which are not mentioned in studies on medial consultation discourse. The study also identifies positions that disrupt the traditional or stereotypical roles of doctor and patient. Besides, it presents dynamic power relations, which problematizes the idea that doctors are always the more powerful party and patients are always powerless in medical encounters. This study sheds light on the importance of examining the affective facet of medical consultation from a discourse analytic perspective, when it comes to identifying non-traditional positions and power relations in clinical communication. The study also provides the implication that e-healthcare platforms, especially those with an e-commercialised model for healthcare services, have potential to produce a type of neo-liberal discourse - the e-commercialised medical consultation discourse - in which patients and caregivers, who are acknowledged as the less powerful group in the traditional healthcare activities, are empowered and privileged
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Bantom, Simlindile Abongile. "Accessibility to patients’ own health information: a case in rural Eastern Cape, South Africa." Thesis, Cape Peninsula University of Technology, 2016. http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.11838/2411.
Full textAbstract:
Thesis (MTech (Information Technology))--Cape Peninsula University of Technology, 2016.<br>Access to healthcare is regarded as a basic and essential human right. It is widely known that ICT solutions have potential to improve access to healthcare, reduce healthcare cost, reduce medical errors, and bridge the digital divide between rural and urban healthcare centres. The access to personal healthcare records is, however, an astounding challenge for both patients and healthcare professionals alike, particularly within resource-restricted environments (such as rural communities). Most rural healthcare institutions have limited or non-existent access to electronic patient healthcare records. This study explored the accessibility of personal healthcare records by patients and healthcare professionals within a rural community hospital in the Eastern Cape Province of South Africa. The case study was conducted at the St. Barnabas Hospital with the support and permission from the Faculty of Informatics and Design, Cape Peninsula University of Technology and the Eastern Cape Department of Health. Semi-structured interviews, observations, and interactive co-design sessions and focus groups served as the main data collection methods used to determine the accessibility of personal healthcare records by the relevant stakeholders. The data was qualitatively interpreted using thematic analysis. The study highlighted the various challenges experienced by healthcare professionals and patients, including time-consuming manual processes, lack of infrastructure, illegible hand-written records, missing records and illiteracy. A number of recommendations for improved access to personal healthcare records are discussed. The significance of the study articulates the imperative need for seamless and secure access to personal healthcare records, not only within rural areas but within all communities.
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Wu, Tsung-Lin. "Classification models for disease diagnosis and outcome analysis." Diss., Georgia Institute of Technology, 2011. http://hdl.handle.net/1853/44918.
Full textAbstract:
In this dissertation we study the feature selection and classification problems and apply our methods to real-world medical and biological data sets for disease diagnosis.
Classification is an important problem in disease diagnosis to distinguish patients from normal population. DAMIP (discriminant analysis -- mixed integer program) was shown to be a good classification model, which can directly handle multigroup problems, enforce misclassification limits, and provide reserved judgement region. However, DAMIP is NP-hard and presents computational challenges. Feature selection is important in classification to improve the prediction performance, prevent over-fitting, or facilitate data understanding. However, this combinatorial problem becomes intractable when the number of features is large.
In this dissertation, we propose a modified particle swarm optimization (PSO), a heuristic method, to solve the feature selection problem, and we study its parameter selection in our applications. We derive theories and exact algorithms to solve the two-group DAMIP in polynomial time. We also propose a heuristic algorithm to solve the multigroup DAMIP. Computational studies on simulated data and data from UCI machine learning repository show that the proposed algorithm performs very well. The polynomial solution time of the heuristic method allows us to solve DAMIP repeatedly within the feature selection procedure.
We apply the PSO/DAMIP classification framework to several real-life medical and biological prediction problems. (1) Alzheimer's disease: We use data from several neuropsychological tests to discriminate subjects of Alzheimer's disease, subjects of mild cognitive impairment, and control groups. (2) Cardiovascular disease: We use traditional risk factors and novel oxidative stress biomarkers to predict subjects who are at high or low risk of cardiovascular disease, in which the risk is measured by the thickness of the carotid intima-media or/and the flow-mediated vasodilation. (3) Sulfur amino acid (SAA) intake: We use 1H NMR spectral data of human plasma to classify plasma samples obtained with low SAA intake or high SAA intake. This shows that our method helps for metabolomics study. (4) CpG islands for lung cancer: We identify a large number of sequence patterns (in the order of millions), search candidate patterns from DNA sequences in CpG islands, and look for patterns which can discriminate methylation-prone and methylation-resistant (or in addition, methylation-sporadic) sequences, which relate to early lung cancer prediction.