Tomorrow's Healthcare Research Articles

E-Blood Bank Monitoring for Tomorrow's Healthcare

E-Blood Bank Monitoring for Tomorrow's Healthcare

ChatGPT in Urology: Bridging Knowledge and Practice for Tomorrow's Healthcare, a Comprehensive Review.

Background: Among emerging AI technologies, Chat-Generative Pre-Trained Transformer (ChatGPT) emerges as a notable language model, uniquely developed through artificial intelligence research. Its proven versatility across various domains, from language translation to healthcare data processing, underscores its promise within medical documentation, diagnostics, research, and education. The current comprehensive review aimed to investigate the utility of ChatGPT in urology education and practice and to highlight its potential limitations. Methods: The authors conducted a comprehensive literature review of the use of ChatGPT and its applications in urology education, research, and practice. Through a systematic review of the literature, with a search strategy using databases, such as PubMed and Embase, we analyzed the advantages and limitations of using ChatGPT in urology and evaluated its potential impact. Results: A total of 78 records were eligible for inclusion. The benefits of ChatGPT were frequently cited across various contexts. In educational/academic benefits mentioned in 21 records (87.5%), ChatGPT showed the ability to assist urologists by offering precise information and responding to inquiries derived from patient data analysis, thereby supporting decision making; in 18 records (75%), advantages comprised personalized medicine, predictive capabilities for disease risks and outcomes, streamlining clinical workflows and improved diagnostics. Nevertheless, apprehensions were expressed regarding potential misinformation, underscoring the necessity for human supervision to guarantee patient safety and address ethical concerns. Conclusion: The potential applications of ChatGPT hold the capacity to bring about transformative changes in urology education, research, and practice. AI technology can serve as a useful tool to augment human intelligence; however, it is essential to use it in a responsible and ethical manner.

Charting Tomorrow's Healthcare: A Traditional Literature Review for an Artificial Intelligence-Driven Future.

Electronic health record (EHR) systems have developed over time in parallel with general advancements in mainstream technology. As artificially intelligent (AI) systems rapidly impact multiple societal sectors, it has become apparent that medicine is not immune from the influences of this powerful technology. Particularly appealing is how AI may aid in improving healthcare efficiency with note-writing automation. This literature review explores the current state of EHR technologies in healthcare, specifically focusing on possibilities for addressing EHR challenges through the automation of dictation and note-writing processes with AI integration. This review offers a broad understanding of existing capabilities and potential advancements, emphasizing innovations such as voice-to-text dictation, wearable devices, and AI-assisted procedure note dictation. The primary objective is to provide researchers with valuable insights, enabling them to generate new technologies and advancements within the healthcare landscape. By exploring the benefits, challenges, and future of AI integration, this review encourages the development of innovative solutions, with the goal of enhancing patient care and healthcare delivery efficiency.

Tailoring Tomorrow's Healthcare for Young Lives: Precision Medicine in Pediatrics and Advanced Neonatal Care

Precision medicine has emerged as a groundbreaking approach to healthcare, tailoring medical treatment to the individual characteristics of each patient. While its applications have been widely discussed in the context of adult medicine, its role in pediatrics and advanced neonatal care is equally promising. It is ushering in a new era in healthcare, with particular promise in the fields of pediatrics and advanced neonatal care. This article explores the transformative potential of precision medicine in optimizing treatment strategies for pediatric patients and infants in neonatal intensive care units (NICUs). By focusing on genetic, environmental, and lifestyle factors, precision medicine offers targeted therapies, early interventions, and improved outcomes. This paper reviews recent advancements, ethical considerations, and challenges associated with implementing precision medicine in pediatric and neonatal healthcare. The integration of genomic data, advanced diagnostic tools, and personalized treatment plans exemplifies the future of healthcare, promising enhanced quality of life for young patients. This article explores the current landscape of precision medicine in pediatrics, with a specific focus on neonatal care, highlighting its potential benefits, challenges, and prospects.

The Lifeboat at World's End: Moving Beyond Crisis Standards of Care.

It may be too late to avoid the climate crisis, likely to be humanity's most expensive, widespread, and enduring catastrophe. This is a qualitatively different kind of catastrophe, in which increased costs, decreased revenue, and no possibility of bailout force communities to harshly cut budgets, especially in health care. Little is known about making such brutal cuts fair or efficient, nor how to help the public accept them. The crisis presents an opportunity for bioethicists to play a crucial role, but one for which traditional approaches are inherently inadequate. Although often dismissed as heartless, Garrett Hardin's "lifeboat ethics" started a conversation about making ethical choices in global disasters-where all options are painful and unacceptable-and may provide guidance. Bioethics during the climate crisis must focus on communities rather than individuals and help survivors grieve the terrible consequences. Because today's choices will affect many generations, with the burdens falling most heavily on poor communities, we have to construct a radical bioethics to help tomorrow's health care become green, efficient, and fair.

Message from the Dean

The Dean congratulates the Academy of Distinguished Educators on the 12th anniversary of its founding and for promoting excellence in educating tomorrow's health care providers across disciplines, innovation, experimentation, and evaluation of methods used for instruction and assessment and encouraging approaches that are reasonable and evidence-based.

Recruiting and Training a Health Professions Workforce to Meet the Needs of Tomorrow's Health Care System.

The quality of any health care system depends on the caliber, enthusiasm, and diversity of the workforce. Yet, workforce research often focuses on the number and type of health professionals needed and anticipated shortages compared with anticipated needs. These projections do not address whether the workforce will have the requisite social, intellectual, cultural, and emotional capital needed to deliver care in an increasingly complex health care system.Building a workforce that can deliver care in such a system begins by recruiting individuals with the requisite knowledge, skills, and attributes. To address this and other workforce needs, the authors argue that health professions education programs must make purposeful changes to their admissions criteria, such as focusing on emotional intelligence and diversity and recruiting students from the communities where they will return to work; partner with communities; ensure that accreditation systems support these goals of fostering diversity; recruit students who can bridge the gap between public health and health care; and invest in health professions education research.In this article, they contemplate how health professions education programs can recruit and educate talented health professionals to create a high-performing workforce that is capable of serving in the complex health care system of tomorrow. They provide examples of successful programs to highlight the potential effects of their recommendations.

Should DNP Students Be Permitted to “STEP-OUT” With a Master’s Degree?

Should DNP Students Be Permitted to “STEP-OUT” With a Master’s Degree?

Undergraduate Minor in Health Disparities in Society: a Magnet for Under-represented Pre-professional Students.

Increasing the diversity of tomorrow's healthcare work force remains a challenge despite many thoughtful published reports and recommendations. As part of an effort to grow a more diverse pre-professional health population, we created an undergraduate minor, Health Disparities in Society, at the University of Florida. Most courses for the minor were identified from existing offerings, and we created only two new courses, an introduction course and a capstone service-learning course. The new minor quickly became the most popular in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences (which has approximately 12,000 total undergraduate students), and importantly, students selecting the minor were more likely to be under-represented minorities than would be expected given undergraduate demographics. Pre-professional students choosing this minor reflect the desired diversity of the healthcare workforce of tomorrow.

A New Healthcare Alliance: Consumer Engagement in the New Healthcare Economy

A New Healthcare Alliance: Consumer Engagement in the New Healthcare Economy

Undergraduate medical students' empathy: current perspectives.

Empathy is important to patient care. It enhances patients’ satisfaction, comfort, self-efficacy, and trust which in turn may facilitate better diagnosis, shared decision making, and therapy adherence. Empathetic doctors experience greater job satisfaction and psychological well-being. Understanding the development of empathy of tomorrow’s health care professionals is important. However, clinical empathy is poorly defined and difficult to measure, while ways to enhance it remain unclear. This review examines empathy among undergraduate medical students, focusing upon three main questions: How is empathy measured? This section discusses the problems of assessing empathy and outlines the utility of the Jefferson Scale of Empathy – Student Version and Davis’s Interpersonal Reactivity Index. Both have been used widely to assess medical students’ empathy. Does empathy change during undergraduate medical education? The trajectory of empathy during undergraduate medical education has been and continues to be debated. Potential reasons for contrasting results of studies are outlined. What factors may influence the development of empathy? Although the influence of sex is widely recognized, the impact of culture, psychological well-being, and aspects of undergraduate curricula are less well understood. This review identifies three interrelated issues for future research into undergraduate medical students’ empathy. First, the need for greater clarity of definition, recognizing that empathy is multidimensional. Second, the need to develop meaningful ways of measuring empathy which include its component dimensions and which are relevant to patients’ experiences. Medical education research has generally relied upon single, self-report instruments, which have utility across large populations but are limited. Finally, there is a need for greater methodological rigor in investigating the possible determinants of clinical empathy in medical education. Greater specificity of context and the incorporation of work from other disciplines may facilitate this.

Health care reform brings new opportunities

Health care reform brings new opportunities

Measuring Success in Spine Care

Everything that can be counted does not necessarily count; everything that counts cannot necessarily be counted. Albert Einstein Spine surgery can be one of the most rewarding of medical specialties, yet spine care has invoked questions and even controversy from some circles. Undoubtedly, the well-being of humans is closely tied to a well-functioning spine, but maintaining it in well-functioning conditions through the course of a long and active lifetime is uncommon. Although it is well-known that a dysfunctional spine can cause its owner severe disability due to structural, neurologic, or painful circumstances, we frequently struggle to quantify these conditions and remain incomplete in providing irrefutable evidence of the effectiveness of some of our interventions. In our quest for validation of conditions and our interventions, we resort to metrics, frequently applied through tests. While these promise objectivity through reproducible quantification, the question remains: What do these tests actually measure and what do the results actually mean? AOSpine recently published a comprehensive compilation of measurements used in spine care (a project in which I had the honor of serving as a coeditor). With this third book, Measurements in Spine Care,1 in a series titled Science in Spine Care, AOSpine set out to review all meaningful, clinical, spine-related tests, be they neurological, laboratory, radiographic, and more. The tests were then rated in a fashion similar to popular publications such as Consumer Reports and US News and World Report. As in our previous books, Spine Outcomes Measures and Instruments2 and Spine Classifications and Severity Measures,3 the editors were surprised with the paucity of meaningful and well-validated objective measurements in our discipline. Similar to our observations in the other areas of patient-related outcome measures and diseases/injury classification/severity ratings, our field is widely bereft of objective, reproducible quantifications of virtually all domains in which the well-being and function of spine are being tested. One of Albert Einstein's most famous insights yet again seems to be proven. There are, however, many areas in which progress has been made, and functionality can be tested, such as in pulmonary function as an indirect expression of torso health and simple walking or balancing tests for myelopathy. Many of these measurement opportunities are little known within the spine community due to a persistent “silo-mentality.” Hopefully, this book will provide inspiration to the scientifically motivated members of the spine community to advance our endeavors with sound applications to measure success. As for EBSJ, we have an easier time to measure success: readership numbers, being listed in large search engines, and impact factor. Aside from boasting one of the largest readerships in spine surgery with over 10,000 readers worldwide, we are now listed in PubMed and all the issues through early 2012 have been downloaded with a catching up to present day expected over the next few months. We have also made the strategic decision to begin merging some of our operations with Global Spine Journal published by Thieme. While maintaining our unique publication and in-depth review style, we will now be able to reach more colleagues and expand our popular systematic reviews to as many as four articles per issue by working with a respected large commercial publisher and offering expanded publication options to our scientifically minded spine practitioner readership. We hope that many of you will continue on the path of improving the quality of spine care and proving the value of what we are doing for our patients and society at large through steady application of sound, scientifically derived insights. Please do join us in this quest with your article submissions, reviews, and editorial board work with Global Spine Journal and Evidence-Based Spine-Care Journal as we meet the challenges of tomorrow's health care by learning from the failures of the past and present through sound scientific principles. “Failure is success if we learn from it.” Malcolm Forbes

Biomaterials and bioengineering tomorrow’s healthcare

Biomaterials are being used for the healthcare applications from ancient times. But subsequent evolution has made them more versatile and has increased their utility. Biomaterials have revolutionized the areas like bioengineering and tissue engineering for the development of novel strategies to combat life threatening diseases. Together with biomaterials, stem cell technology is also being used to improve the existing healthcare facilities. These concepts and technologies are being used for the treatment of different diseases like cardiac failure, fractures, deep skin injuries, etc. Introduction of nanomaterials on the other hand is becoming a big hope for a better and an affordable healthcare. Technological advancements are underway for the development of continuous monitoring and regulating glucose levels by the implantation of sensor chips. Lab-on-a-chip technology is expected to modernize the diagnostics and make it more easy and regulated. Other area which can improve the tomorrow’s healthcare is drug delivery. Micro-needles have the potential to overcome the limitations of conventional needles and are being studied for the delivery of drugs at different location in human body. There is a huge advancement in the area of scaffold fabrication which has improved the potentiality of tissue engineering. Most emerging scaffolds for tissue engineering are hydrogels and cryogels. Dynamic hydrogels have huge application in tissue engineering and drug delivery. Furthermore, cryogels being supermacroporous allow the attachment and proliferation of most of the mammalian cell types and have shown application in tissue engineering and bioseparation. With further developments we expect these technologies to hit the market in near future which can immensely improve the healthcare facilities.

National survey of clinical placement settings across Canada for nursing and other healthcare professions—who's using what?

The types of pre-licensure clinical placements being used and by what health professions are becoming an important and pressing issue as concerns about clinical placement shortages and competition for placements increase. This study was designed to address a gap in the literature by quantifying the range and specific types of pre-licensure clinical placements being used by nursing and other health professions. This was a Canadian national online cross-sectional survey designed to create an inventory of the types of hospital, community, long-term care, and innovative settings being used for pre-licensure clinical placements by schools of nursing, licensed practical nursing, registered psychiatric nursing, midwifery, occupational therapy, physiotherapy, and medicine. The response rate was 70% (113/162). There was no difference in nursing vs. other professions in the general types of placements used-hospitals (97%), community (93%), and long-term care (93%), or travel out of the academic community for placements (85%) which was primarily intra-provincial and rural. Medical and surgical inpatient units were the specific types of placements most commonly used by all respondents (93%). The significant differences included more nursing schools using inpatient maternal/child (p<0.001), mental health (p=0.006), and pediatric (p=0.006), and community public health (p<0.001), and more other healthcare professions using hospital outpatient orthopedic (p=0.002) and research placements (p=0.001). The innovative placements reported by respondents were all community-based and quite diverse (e.g., summer camps, businesses, etc.). This inventory of pre-licensure clinical placements fills a gap in the literature and revealed a broad and diverse range of settings being used by nursing and other healthcare professions, especially in the community. The diversity raises questions as to whether the organization of clinical education in the past is the best way to meet the needs of tomorrow's healthcare providers, yet it also offers new possibilities for re-contextualizing pre-licensure clinical education.

Convolving Engineering and Medical Pedagogies for Training of Tomorrow's Health Care Professionals

Several fundamental benefits justify why biomedical engineering and medicine should form a more convergent alliance, especially for the training of tomorrow's physicians and biomedical engineers. Herein, we review the rationale underlying the benefits. Biological discovery has advanced beyond the era of molecular biology well into today's era of molecular systems biology, which focuses on understanding the rules that govern the behavior of complex living systems. This has important medical implications. To realize cost-effective personalized medicine, it is necessary to translate the advances in molecular systems biology to higher levels of biological organization (organ, system, and organismal levels) and then to develop new medical therapeutics based on simulation and medical informatics analysis. Higher education in biological and medical sciences must adapt to a new set of training objectives. This will involve a shifting away from reductionist problem solving toward more integrative, continuum, and predictive modeling approaches which traditionally have been more associated with engineering science. Future biomedical engineers and MDs must be able to predict clinical response to therapeutic intervention. Medical education will involve engineering pedagogies, wherein basic governing rules of complex system behavior and skill sets in manipulating these systems to achieve a practical desired outcome are taught. Similarly, graduate biomedical engineering programs will include more practical exposure to clinical problem solving.

Talking about obesity with clients: Preferred terms and communication styles of UK pre-registration dieticians, doctors, and nurses

ObjectiveTo describe trainee healthcare professionals’ preferred terms when talking about obesity, their beliefs about initiating discussions about weight, and their confidence about consulting with obese people. MethodsA self-completed questionnaire collected data on demographics, preferred terms, beliefs about initiation of discussions, confidence and training needs from 1036 pre-registration dieticians, nurses and doctors. ResultsParticipants’ preferred terms when raising the issue of obesity with clients were BMI (mean=.96), weight (mean=.71) and unhealthy BMI (mean=.43). When defining a client's bodyweight, students endorsed the euphemism ‘your weight may be damaging your health’ (67.6%). A proactive, collaborative communication style was preferred by 34.9% of participants. 58.2% of participants felt confident about discussing obesity with clients and 95.1% felt that that more training would be useful. ConclusionIt is reassuring that UK trainee healthcare professionals avoid value-laden terms and broadly endorse words preferred by people with obesity. It is, however, concerning that the majority of participants did not favor a proactive, collaborative communication style. Practice implicationsEducators of tomorrow's healthcare professionals could take advantage of students’ desire for more training on how to effectively talk to clients with obesity about their weight. Such training would, however, require the development of clear guidelines on terminology and communication styles.

Smoking prevalence and attitudes regarding its control among health professional students in South-Western Nigeria

Background:Tobacco use is one of the leading preventable causes of morbidity and mortality globally; about 70% of smokers see physicians each year. Health care professionals have a very unique role in motivating people to quit smoking.Aim:The aims of this study were to document the smoking prevalence and attitudes regarding its control among these set of students who will be tomorrow's health care providers.Subjects and Methods:A cross-sectional survey was conducted in two medical schools in South-Western Nigeria with their accompanied nursing and pharmacy students. All students in the selected schools were eligible to participate and student's participation was voluntary. The Global Health Professional Students Survey core questionnaire was used to collect data on smoking prevalence and attitudes regarding its control. The data were summarized using percentages and confidence interval (CI) was calculated using standard error of mean. Pearson's Chi-square and fisher's exact were employed to test the significance.Results:Life-time prevalence of cigarette smoking was 17.9% (121/675) with (95% confidence interval [CI] 15-20.8). Only 5.04% (34/675) with (95% CI 3.7-7.1) of the respondents were currently smoking. Ever smokers were significantly less likely than non-smokers to indicate that tobacco sales to adolescents should be banned (P < 0.01). Fewer smokers than non-smokers agreed that there should be a complete ban on advertising of tobacco products (P < 0.001). 93.3% of them said that they were taught about danger of smoking but only 48.6% ever heard of using anti-depressant in tobacco cessation program.Conclusions:Smoking prevalence among health professional students in South-West Nigeria is relatively low; however, majority believed that health-care providers serve as role models for their patients and the public.

Are Anti-Stigma Films a Useful Strategy for Reducing Weight Bias Among Trainee Healthcare Professionals? Results of a Pilot Randomized Control Trial

Background: Weight bias is an important clinical issue that the educators of tomorrow's healthcare professionals cannot afford to ignore. This study, therefore, aimed to pilot a randomized controlled trial of the effects of educational films designed to reduce weight stigmatization toward obese patients on trainee dietitians' and doctors' attitudes. Methods: A pre-post experimental design with a 6-week follow-up, which consisted of an intervention group (n = 22) and a control group (n = 21), was conducted to assess the efficacy of brief anti-stigma films in reducing weight bias, and to test whether future, larger-scale studies among trainee healthcare professionals are feasible. Results: Participants at baseline demonstrated weight bias, on both implicit and explicit attitude measures, as well as strong beliefs that obesity is under a person's control. The intervention films significantly improved explicit attitudes and beliefs toward obese people, and participant evaluation was very positive. The intervention did not significantly improve implicit anti-fat bias. Conclusion: The current study suggests both that it is possible to conduct a substantive trial of the effects of educational films designed to reduce weight stigma on a larger cohort of trainee healthcare professionals, and that brief educational interventions may be effective in reducing stigmatizing attitudes in this population.

Twenty years forward.

INTRODUCTION It is very humbling to provide commentary to JRRD's 50th anniversary edition, especially in light of the enormous contributions that the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) and Department of Defense (DOD) have made in the advancement of rehabilitative medicine over the past half century. Since the Civil War, the United States and its citizens have been inspired by the words of President Lincoln, who during his second inaugural address on March 4, 1865 stated-- With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation's wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow, and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations. In response to President Lincoln's call to action, countless individuals have dedicated their lives and professional careers to caring for our nation's service members and families. The same holds true today. During the last decade of war, I have had the privilege of serving in various capacities within the military healthcare system, most recently as the Chief of Orthopaedics and Rehabilitation at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland. These positions have afforded me the unique opportunity to meet and work with some of the most dedicated and exceptional professionals within the VA and DOD healthcare systems. I am continually amazed at not only their expertise, but also their tireless efforts to apply their skills to improve the lives of our service members and veterans and their families. Moreover, they demonstrate relentless determination and intellectual curiosity toward the discovery of new therapeutic interventions to further improve the care available to our nation's heroes. Their work is inspiring and infectious to healthcare professionals, scientists, and researchers across the globe. As history has shown us, optimal care for combat casualties requires coordinated interdisciplinary care by professionals across medical, surgical, rehabilitative, and psychological health disciplines. Providing coordinated care, however, presents its own unique challenges, especially in today's healthcare environment where many physicians, therapists, nurses, psychologists, social workers, orthotists, and prosthetists have become subspecialized to the point where they risk losing sight of the patient's overall well-being. While the advancements in each of these specialties offer improved diagnostic capabilities and enhanced treatment options, we must remain aware of the dynamic between specialties to ensure that each treatment plan is coordinated to best achieve the individual patient's goals. As scientific discoveries continue to surface, teamwork will play an increasingly vital role in the advancement of care for combat casualties. Advances in fields such as robotics, regenerative medicine, genetics, genomics, and neuroscience have the potential to ignite a synergy across disciplines in order to revolutionize tomorrow's healthcare. In addition, evidence continues to emerge indicating the benefits of recreational activities, sports, peer support, and the creative arts on rehabilitation, recovery, resilience, and reintegration after injury or illness--further emphasizing the expanding contributions of various disciplines to healthcare advances. Determining the optimal coordination of these disciplines will require leadership within the DOD and VA healthcare systems to build a model for the country to follow. Furthermore, we must ensure that the lessons learned from the past decade of war, especially regarding the positive effect of interdisciplinary and multidimensional care, are not lost to future generations of military and veteran healthcare providers. Therefore, our educational systems must not only carry forward these lessons learned, but also be able to adapt to healthcare advances and rapidly integrate new discoveries into military-unique curricula to ensure these discoveries are expeditiously disseminated throughout clinical care settings. …