Healthcare Services Information Research Articles

Clinical nursing competency during epidemics: a qualitative content analysis

BackgroundNurses are on the frontline for managing epidemic diseases. Different aspects of clinical nursing competencies during epidemics are important issues that need investigation.ObjectivesThe aim of this study was to determine the required clinical competencies for nurses during epidemics. Understanding these competencies could provide valuable information for health care services and nursing education organizations to prepare nurses for future epidemics.MethodsThe qualitative conventional content analysis study was conducted using semi-structured interviews with 12 nurses that were actively engaged in providing patient care during COVID-19 pandemic in Shahid Beheshti hospital in Kashan/Iran, from October 2022 to March 2023. The data analysis process was conducted according to 5 steps suggested by Graneheim and Lundman.ResultsAfter analysis, the 159 competencies were derived from interviews that were categorized to 11 subcategories, and three categories of clinical nursing skills in epidemics, knowledge of epidemics, and soft skills for nurses in epidemics.ConclusionNurses need wide range of competencies to address the professional expectations regarding providing acceptable care during epidemics. Knowing these competencies can help nursing managers to prepare nurses for crisis such as what world experienced during COVID-19 pandemic.

Morbilidad metabólica en la población penitenciaria de Cataluña

ObjectiveTo investigate the prevalence of metabolic morbidity (MM) amongst prison inmates. DesignMulticentric, cross-sectional observational study. SettingAll (nine) prisons in Catalonia. ParticipantsConvicted inmates that are not in an «open regime», whose healthcare relies on the Prison Primary Care Teams. InterventionsMM was defined as the presence of at least one component of the metabolic syndrome, i.e., obesity, arterial hypertension, type2 diabetes, and/or dyslipidemia. The variables collected included anthropometric measurements, medical history and laboratory values related to MM. The source of information was the Catalan Primary Healthcare Services Information System (SISAP). Main measurementsThe prevalence of MM, overall and by several participant subcategories, was calculated. To investigate the risk factors associated to a higher prevalence of MM, a multivariable logistic regression analysis was carried out and expressed as adjusted odds ratios and 95% confidence intervals. Results4338 inmates were studied, of whom 93.9% were male. Mean age was 38.4years, 51.7% were born in European Union countries, and 6.7% were infected by HIV. The variables associated with a significantly increased risk of presenting MM were older age and HIV infection, whereas certain geographical origins (i.e., non-UE European countries, Maghreb and Sub-Saharan Africa) were associated with lower risk of MM. ConclusionsIn spite of being an overall young population, prison inmates present high rates of MM. Older age, HIV infection and geographic origin appear as the most strongly associated factors with MM in the prison population. MM should be detected early in order to prevent complications. Prevention, screening and treatment of MM ought to be considered a priority in the clinical routine of prison healthcare professionals.

Studi Kualitatif Layanan Kesehatan Yang Diterima Orang Dengan HIV

Comprehensive health care service is right for people living with HIV / AIDS. It is important to know and dig deeply the need of healthcare services among people living with HIV as a vulnerable group. Exploration of health care provider services received by people living with HIV can provide a thick description related to the process of care and treatment. In-depth interviews conducted in nine people living with HIV who utilize health care services in Jakarta. In this phenomenological qualitative study researchers have used the data analysis stage according to Stevick-Colaizzi. This study identifies the essence of the health care received by people living with HIV are health care services information, easy access to health care services, service before the test, service after the test, get ARVs and treatment of health complaints. The findings recommend health care providers further optimized in order to give real impact in the prevention of HIV / AIDS pandemic.

Enhancing Clinical Management of Bariatric Surgery Using Business Intelligence

There is a problem with collecting information in healthcare services as it is scattered among various sources. This leads to potential impact on patient care focus. To address this issue, a Business Intelligence platform was developed and implemented at the Centre for Surgical Treatment of Obesity at Centro Hospitalar do Tâmega e Sousa. The platform developed enables knowledge extraction and aids healthcare professionals to easily access helpful information and perform better decisions, specifically in regards to the growing global concern of obesity and the increasing prevalence of bariatric surgery.

Method for managing requirements in healthcare projects using building information modelling

PurposeThis paper proposes a method for managing client requirements with the use of Building Information Modelling (BIM). The development of healthcare projects demands a large amount of requirements information, in order to deal with a diversity of clients and frequents changes in healthcare services. The proposed method supports healthcare design by adopting a process-based approach for client requirements management, with the aim of improving value generation.Design/methodology/approachDesign Science Research was the methodological approach adopted in this investigation. The main outcome of this study emerged from an empirical study carried out in a healthcare project in Brazil.FindingsThe proposed method involves three stages: (1) capturing and processing requirements; (2) product and requirements modelling, which involves the connection between requirements and the BIM 3-D model and (3) supporting design solution refinement, through the communication of requirements and the assessment of design in relation to updated client requirements information.Originality/valueThis study explores client requirements management from a process perspective, proposing activities and their interdependences and possible sources of data, including healthcare services information. The main theoretical contributions are related to the understanding of the nature and complexity of the information involved in client requirements management, and how this can be modelled.

Perceived Utilities of COVID-19 Related Chatbots in Saudi Arabia: a Cross-sectional Study.

Introduction:Health chatbots are increasingly being utilized in healthcare to combat COVID-19. However, few studies have explored the perception and willingness of end-users toward COVID-19-related chatbots. Furthermore, no studies have been conducted in Saudi Arabia.Aim:This paper explored 166 end-users’ perceived utilities of health chatbots in Saudi Arabia, and how their characteristics affect their perceptions.Methods:We conducted a quantitative descriptive study by implementing an online survey. The survey asked 20 questions on participants’ demographics and their perception of health chatbots’ usefulness.Results:We found that users were more willing to use health chatbots to seek general information about COVID-19 (82.5%) over seeking information regarding COVID-19 medical treatments (72.3%). Furthermore, participants with undergraduate degrees tend to use them to learn how to prevent COVID-19’s spread (P = 0.015), to self-track COVID-19 symptoms (P = 0.028), and to seek information about medication (P = 0.035) in comparison to those who had postgraduate degrees. Participants who frequently searched for health information on the internet were more likely to look for nearby medical services using health chatbots (P = 0.023). Lastly, participants who provided any sort of healthcare services information were more likely to self-assess COVID-19 symptoms by using health chatbots (P = 0.036).Conclusion:Participant awareness and use of health chatbots were low; however, most had positive perceptions of these emerging technologies and displayed willingness to use them. Further research is needed to capture the real-world usability of these novel technologies by employing more rigid methodological designs (e.g, field trials).

Perceived Utilities of COVID-19 Related Chatbots in Saudi Arabia: a Cross-sectional Study

Introduction Health chatbots are increasingly being utilized in healthcare to combat COVID-19. However, few studies have explored the perception and willingness of end-users toward COVID-19-related chatbots. Furthermore, no studies have been conducted in Saudi Arabia. Aim This paper explored 166 end-users' perceived utilities of health chatbots in Saudi Arabia, and how their characteristics affect their perceptions. Methods We conducted a quantitative descriptive study by implementing an online survey. The survey asked 20 questions on participants' demographics and their perception of health chatbots' usefulness. Results We found that users were more willing to use health chatbots to seek general information about COVID-19 (82.5%) over seeking information regarding COVID-19 medical treatments (72.3%). Furthermore, participants with undergraduate degrees tend to use them to learn how to prevent COVID-19's spread (P = 0.015), to self-track COVID-19 symptoms (P = 0.028), and to seek information about medication (P = 0.035) in comparison to those who had postgraduate degrees. Participants who frequently searched for health information on the internet were more likely to look for nearby medical services using health chatbots (P = 0.023). Lastly, participants who provided any sort of healthcare services information were more likely to self-assess COVID-19 symptoms by using health chatbots (P = 0.036). Conclusion Participant awareness and use of health chatbots were low; however, most had positive perceptions of these emerging technologies and displayed willingness to use them. Further research is needed to capture the real-world usability of these novel technologies by employing more rigid methodological designs (e.g, field trials).

Health service security of patients with 8 certain rare diseases: evidence from China\u2019s national system for health service utilization of patients with healthcare insurance

BackgroundRare diseases are one of the major challenges in the era of precision medicine and reflect the social security level of minority groups. This study aimed to investigate healthcare service utilization and health security of patients with rare diseases in China.MethodsFrom 29 provinces of Mainland China, 7,747 visits with eight common rare diseases who were linked to the national insurance database between 2014 and 2016 were selected as the study population, whose demographic and healthcare service information was collected from China’s national monitoring system for health service utilization of patients with healthcare insurance. Univariate analysis was performed to describe the basic statement of healthcare service, such as visit type, institution type, length of stay, healthcare insurance utilization, and the results of disease burden for different groups and its factors were analyzed by multivariate analysis.ResultsMedical treatment from general tertiary hospitals was sought by 61.4% of the patients with rare diseases. Of the total treatment cost (TTC) of 40.18 million Chinese Yuan, 63.3% was paid by basic health insurance, and 54.2% of the medical cost resulted from medicine expenditure. Demography, geography and social-economic factors, security level, and health institution situation had an effect on the TTC. The correlations between these factors and TTC were different for outpatients and inpatients. Reimbursement rate had the highest effect on inpatients’ TTC. Basic insurance was effective for providing support for patients with rare diseases that involved high costs; however, the coverage was limited.ConclusionsHealthcare insurance is an effective safeguard for patients with rare diseases; however, affordable and accessible treatment is still lacking for such patients. There remains a need to further improve the diagnostic and treatment technology for rare diseases and expertise among doctors, as well as the security level of healthcare policies.

Registry of Older South Australians (ROSA): framework and plan

IntroductionAustralia’s ageing population puts significant demands on the aged care and healthcare sectors. To monitor the provision of aged care and healthcare services to older people, each government body has...

Using Social Media for Effective Health Care Service Delivery: Bibliometrics and Sociometry

Abstract Background: Today, social media seems to be a common forum for sharing information, discuss ideas and knowledge. The number of social media users are at increasing trend even in developing countries. The importance of using social media, especially in delivering healthcare services information, include the creation of awareness and firsthand information of health and health-related issues (effect of adverse drug reactions, reporting, among others). Purpose: The main objective of this work is to outline and discuss the opportunities and challenges of using social media in the health area. Specifically, the objectives of this paper are to compare the role of health professionals and consumers with special reference to social media; detect the validity of the information available in social media, and understand how to deal with incorrect/false information, and to analyze the main characteristics of the publications on the subject social media in healthcare. Methods: This article is a narrative review, also a descriptive quantitative research, using the techniques of bibliometrics and sociometry in order to obtain information relevant to the subject in question. Results: The results presented the countries, researchers and universities that produced the most on the subject, and demonstrated the efficiency of bibliometrics and sociometry techniques for health research, going beyond a narrative review. Conclusion: It is concluded that social media is a competitive differential in the provision of health services. To this end, institutions should empower their employees, encourage them to seek and convey reliable and accurate information, monitor routines, and evaluate results through user feedback. Suggestion: To this end, institutions should empower their employees, encourage them to seek and convey reliable and accurate information, monitor routines, and evaluate results through user feedback.

Suicide attempts in Spain according to prehospital healthcare emergency records.

ObjectiveTo analyze the number and characteristics of suicide attempts by reviewing records of the public emergency healthcare service information system.MethodA retrospective observational study was conducted of emergency telephone calls received between January 1 2007 and December 31 2013 throughout the Andalusia region (Southern Spain). Cases were selected based on phone operator or healthcare team labeling. Data were analyzed on the characteristics of the individuals, the timing and severity of attempts, their prioritization, and their outcome.ResultsBetween January 1 2007 and December 31 2013, 20.942 calls related to suicide attempts were recorded, a rate of 34.7 attempts per 100,000 inhabitants. Most cases were classified by the public emergency healthcare service (Empresa Pública de Emergencias Sanitarias, EPES) as code X84 (The International Statistical Classification of Diseases, tenth revision, ICD-10) or 305(The International Statistical Classification of Diseases, ninth revision, ICD-9). Attempts were more frequent in the 35-49-year age group and there were similar proportions of males and females. The lowest number of calls for suicide attempts were in 2007 and the highest in 2013. Calls were more frequent during the summer months, at weekends, and between 16:00 and 23:00 h. The likelihood of evacuation to the hospital emergency department was almost two-fold lower in over 65-yr-olds than in younger individuals.Significant (ƿ = 0.001) gender differences were found in call outcome and prioritization. The most influential factor for evacuation to a hospital emergency department was the code assigned by the attending healthcare team.ConclusionsInformation obtained from extra-hospital emergency services provides valuable data on the characteristics and timing of calls related to suicide attempts, complementing information from hospital emergency departments or population surveys. There is a need to standardize the definition and recording of a suicide attempt.

Clinical profile and outcomes in octogenarians with atrial fibrillation: A community-based study in a specific European health care area

BackgroundAge increases risk of stroke and bleeding. Clinical trial data have had relatively low proportions of elderly subjects. We sought to study a Spanish population of octogenarians with atrial fibrillation (AF) by combining different sources of electronic clinical records from an area where all medical centres utilized electronic health record systems. MethodsData was derived from the Galician Healthcare Service information system. ResultsFrom 383,000 subjects, AF was coded in 7990 (2.08%), 3640 (45.6%) of whom were ≥80 and 4350 (54.4%)<80. All CHA2DS2-VASc's components were more prevalent in the elderly except for diabetes. Of those ≥80, 2178 (59.8%) were women. Mean CHA2DS2-VASc was 4.2±1.1. Distribution of CHA2DS2-VASc components varied between genders. 2600 (71.4%) were on oral anticoagulant (OA). During a median follow up of 696days (124.23), all-cause mortality was higher in ≥80 (1011/3640 (27.8%) vs 350/4350 (8.05%) (p<0.001). There were differences in rate of thromboembolic (TE) and haemorrhagic events (2.3% vs 0.9%, p<0.01 and 2.5% vs 1.7%, p=0.01 respectively). In octogenarian, differences between genders were observed with regard to TE, but not in haemorrhagic or all-cause mortality rates. Age, heart failure, non-valvular AF, dementia, and OA were independent predictors of all-cause mortality. In regard to TE, female gender, hypertension, previous TE and OA were independent predictive factors. ConclusionsOctogenarians with AF had very different characteristics and outcomes from their younger counterparts. These results also provide reassurance about the effectiveness of OA in preventing TE events and maintaining a reasonable haemorrhagic event rate in the extremely elderly.

Intelligent healthcare service based on context inference using smart device

In the field of "U-Healthcare Service", many studies have been actively conducted to develop "smart device"-based healthcare applications that enable healthcare providers and patients to be better served through interoperations among various kinds of sensors and wireless network interfaces. In particular, contemporary intelligent healthcare services not only recognize users' context information through smart devices, computers, and so forth, but also acquire information from heterogeneous sensors to achieve context-aware inference services. Among such information, the weather information is tightly related to diseases such as asthma and allergies. Therefore, there is a high demand for research to utilize the weather information for healthcare services. In this paper, we propose a context inference-based intelligent healthcare service that exploits both the weather conditions information and the diverse healthcare ontologies available on the Internet. The proposed service aims at modeling a context ontology in users' healthcare service environment and defining the inference rules, thereby accomplishing a satisfactory real-time healthcare service.

Wearable blood flowmeter appcessory with low-power laser Doppler signal processing for daily-life healthcare monitoring.

A new appcessory for monitoring peripheral blood flow in daily life consists of a wearable laser Doppler sensor device and a cooperating smart phone application. Bluetooth Low Energy connects them wirelessly. The sensor device features ultralight weight of 15 g and an intermittent signal processing technique that reduces power consumption to only 7 mW at measurement intervals of 0.1 s. These features enable more than 24-h continuous monitoring of peripheral blood flow in daily life, which can provide valuable vital-sign information for healthcare services.

입원 환자 표본 개발에 관한 연구: 국민건강보험 청구자료를 중심으로

Korea has a single National Health Insurance program and all citizens are covered under this program, accounting 97% of the population, approximately 50 million people. Claims submitted by Health care providers are reviewed by Health Insurance Review and Assessment (HIRA) for the reimbursement. HIRA database contains not only individual beneficiary's information, but also healthcare service information such as diagnosis, procedures, prescriptions and tests for them. HRA database has gained attention as importance source for research due to its rich healthcare information and the demand of HIRA database has increased. Due to its tremendous size, however, researchers have had problems in accessing the database to conduct research. To meet this demand, we conducted a study to develop the inpatient sample data from HIRA database for research. This study has two purposes: 1) to determine a needed sample size; 2) to test reliability and validity of the sample data. We determined an adequate sample size to ensure representativeness and generality with additional consideration for convenience of calculation. The minimum sample size was 729,904 for the generality, and 488,861 for representativeness. After considering the convenience of calculation, our final sample size was 13% of the population, which was about 7.7 million beneficiaries. Age (5 years interval) and gender were used as stratification variables for sampling. In order to examine whether this sample data appropriately reflect population, we tested the reliability and validity of the sample data. From the sample data, we computed average expenditure of total claims per inpatient for 2011, frequency of top 30 disease, estimation of the number of stroke patients from the sample data, and then compared them to those from the population. Results confirmed reliability and validity of the sample data.

Factors Influencing the Success of National Healthcare Services Information Systems

By extending the updated D&amp;M IS success model, this study examines the multi-dimensional aspects to identify influential factors and construct a suitable model for explaining NHSS success in Taiwan. Through the empirical results from the perspective of 1215 public healthcare workers, this study has arrived at several findings. First, eight salient factors were found which influenced NHSS success from the dimensions of user characteristics, organizational context, and system characteristics. Second, the factors of user experience, user training, information quality, service quality, and user satisfaction have a strong positive effect on system use, whereas user attitude and facilitating conditions have a significant and negative effect. Further, user attitude, user training, top management support, system quality, information quality, and service quality are also significantly correlated to user satisfaction. The results of this study can assist governments in other countries in developing more effective NHSS and better e-Government practices.

The Strategic Use of Standardized Information Exchange Technology in a University Health System

This article illustrates a Web-based health information system that is comprised of specific information exchange standards related to health information for healthcare services in National Taiwan University Health System. Through multidisciplinary teamwork, medical and informatics experts collaborated and studied on system scope definition, standard selection challenges, system implementation barriers, system management outcomes, and further expandability of other systems. After user requirement analysis and prototyping, from 2005 to 2008, an online clinical decision support system with multiple functions of reminding and information push was implemented. It was to replace its original legacy systems and serve among the main hospital and three branches of 180-200 clinics and 7,500-8,000 patient visits per day. To evaluate the effectiveness of this system, user surveys were performed, which revealed that the average score of user satisfaction increased from 2.80 to 3.18 on a 4-point scale. Among the items, especially e-learning for training service, courtesy communications for system requests, and courtesy communications for system operations showed statistically significant improvement. From this study, the authors concluded that standardized information exchange technologies can be used to create a brand new enterprise value and steadily obtain more competitive advantages for a prestige healthcare system.

Utilization of information sources by the elderly: an empirical investigation.

The behavioral patterns of the elderly population as they relate to the process of obtaining information on services such as health care are not currently well understood. The research reported in this paper examines information usage behavior of the elderly based on a survey consisting of 1060 personal interviews. An examination is made of the sources of information for health care services utilized by the elderly based on demographics and behavioral dimensions.