Studies in Health Technology and Informatics

The current Finnish public hospitals' eHealth services are organization-oriented rather than patient-oriented. Patients remain passive and use eHealth services that are designed by private or governmental organizations. Patients had little or no involvement in that process. This paper introduces a novel eHealth Services Model that can be used as a tool to capture the needs of both organizations and patients. Two eHealth services were used to verify and support the validity of the presented model. The first eHealth service features came from an existing Finnish eHealth service that was designed by a Finnish organization...

The effectiveness of the health care system is largely dependent on the knowledge, skills, and motivation of health care workers, which was particularly evident during the COVID-19 pandemic. The systemic planning of human resources is therefore an important condition for ensuring the sustainability and efficiency of the health care system. This article focuses on outlining a basic model of human resource planning in health care and the investigation of related complexities. An in-depth analysis framework based on various materials and evidence is proposed in order to outline the factors that influence human resource planning in health care...

On the basis of the Estonian National Health System, we propose a universal and reusable methodology for migrating HL7 CDA documents or their components.

The ISO standards for the Identification of Medicinal Products (IDMP) prove to be difficult to implement. Guidance needs to be provided to those using and further developing IDMP-related standards and terminologies. Providing fitting and structured education would be a step forward. This article describes research of current education and certification on IDMP and the creation of an educational framework for targeted IDMP knowledge transfer. This framework indicates the required level of knowledge for the various identified roles within the organizations working with IDMP...

BACKGROUND: Hospitals are complex organizations that frequently need changes especially in service delivery processes, organizing, human resource management, monitoring and evaluation and technologies. Maintaining and improving productivity is a key requirement in hospital change management. Therefore, we need to develop and expand an appropriate model for management of changes in hospitals; which is the main purpose of this study. METHOD: A qualitative approach was used to conduct semi-structured interviews in 2019-2020 with 12 expert managers at Mashhad University of Medical Sciences, Mashhad, Iran...

In this paper, a bibliometric analysis of research on wearable technologies for cardiovascular diseases was conducted with Bibliometrix and based on 1675 papers collected in Scopus from 2000 to 2022, and interesting results were presented. The US and China stood out for their sustained productivity in the field of cardiovascular diseases. The examination of the authors' keywords revealed that between 2000-01 and 2009-12, "Respiration" and "personalized applications" were the most popular research topics, however from 2010-01 to 2019-12, attention was given to "ECG," "Wearable devices," "Wearable sensors," and "heart rate"...

BACKGROUND: Usability is essential for the acceptance and success of vitiligo patient registry system. Poor usability could decrease system efficiency and effectiveness, and have a negative impact on using the system and providing services. This study aims to evaluate the usability of vitiligo patient registry system. METHODS: This pilot study was conducted in 2021. In total, 17 users who were working in the vitiligo ward participated in the study. System usability scale (SUS) was used to evaluate the usability of vitiligo patient registry system...

Evaluating conversational agents (CA) that are supposed to be applied in healthcare and ensuring their quality is essential to avoid patient harm. However, most researchers only study usability and use the CA in clinical trials before conducting such careful evaluation. In previous work, consensus on metrics for evaluating healthcare CA have been found. However, the metrics are still too generic to form an evaluation framework. In this work, we try to link the ISO technical specification ISO/TS 82304-2 Quality Requirements for Health and Wellness Apps to the set of metrics to come a step closer towards an evaluation framework...

The spread of a new coronavirus infection in the last two years together with HIV infection preserves and even increases the potential for the spread of tuberculosis in the world. Sverdlovsk oblast (SO) of Russian Federation is the region with high levels of HIV and tuberculosis (TB). The search for new methods of forecasting of the future epidemic situation for tuberculosis has become particularly relevant. The aim was to develop an effective method for predicting the epidemic situation of tuberculosis using an artificial intelligence (AI) method in the format of a dynamic simulation model based on AI technologies...

The study analyzed scientific texts based on a manually created database of synopses of theses in dentistry. The main goal was to structure medical texts into various topics by means of natural language processing techniques (topic modeling). Furthermore, a dynamic topic modeling showed the most popular in the field of dentistry over almost the last thirty years.

The availability of Big Data has increased significantly in many areas in recent years. Insights from these data sets lead to optimized processes in many industries, which is why understanding as well as gaining knowledge through analyses of these data sets is becoming increasingly relevant. In the medical field, especially in intensive care units, fast and appropriate treatment is crucial due to the usually critical condition of patients. The patient data recorded here is often very heterogeneous and the resulting database models are very complex, so that accessing and thus using this data requires technical background knowledge...

Mapping clinical attributes from hospital information systems to standardized terminologies may allow their scientific reuse for multicenter studies. The Unified Medical Language System (UMLS) defines synonyms in different terminologies, which could be valuable for achieving semantic interoperability between different sites. Here we aim to explore the potential relevance of UMLS concepts and associated semantic relations for widely used clinical terminologies in a German university hospital. To semi-automatically examine a sample of the 200 most frequent codes from Erlangen University Hospital for three relevant terminologies, we implemented a script that queries their UMLS representation and associated mappings via a programming interface...

This paper deals with a developed information system called a Personal Genetic Card (PGC). The system aims to integrate the known clinical knowledge (interpretations and recommendations) linked to genetic information with the analysis results of a patient. Genetic information has an increasing influence on the clinical decision of physicians as well as other medical and health services. All these services need to connect the genetic profile with the phenotypes such as drug metabolization, drug toxicity, drug dosing, or intolerance of some substances...

Anti-Microbial Resistance is one of the greatest threats that mankind faces right now due to the inappropriate use of antibiotics. Institution of appropriate antibiotics in right dose for the right patient at right time is the "gamechanger" in fighting AMR. Antibiotic Sensitivity Testing (AST) or antibiogram is done to ascertain the sensitivity profile of the organism. The most widely used method in laboratory practice in India is the Kirby-Bauer's disk diffusion test. There are few shortcomings in the manual interpretation of antibiograms in the form of high inter-operator variability, mandatory requirement of trained microbiologists - which is difficult in low-resource settings and high degree of interpersonal bias due to various factors like stress, workload, and visual acuity...

Data analysis and their application are the unavoidable factors in the activities analyses in health care. Unfortunately, the acquisition of data from large available medical databases is a complex process and requires deep knowledge of computer science and especially knowledge of tools for data management. According to the European General Data Protection Regulation, the problem becomes much more complex. Recognizing these problems and difficulties, we have developed a Data Science Learning Platform (DSLP) that primarily targets practitioners and researchers but also the computer science students...

Nonalcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD) is a clinical syndrome, and pathologically characterized by diffuse macro-vesicular fatty change in the hepatocytes. NAFLD includes simple nonalcoholic fatty liver disease, nonalcoholic steatohepatitis (NASH) and hepatic cirrhosis. NASH is a disease evolving under the influence of various stimuli still poorly understood, but where insulin resistance is prominently. In this paper, we present a new diagnosis model to predict NASH.

Security awareness training has long been considered a critical element in organizational cybersecurity preparedness and a mandatory activity in many laws and regulations as well as cybersecurity management standards such as ISO 27001. Organizations approach the issue with different methods, but many rely on online training as a cost-effective way to reach a large number of employees at a low cost. When this training is delivered as a voluntary measure, it is essential to have knowledge about the factors contributing to motivation to participate...

Empowerment is a process through which people acquire the necessary knowledge and self-awareness to understand their health conditions and treatment options, self-manage them, and make informed choices. Currently, few stand-alone applications for patient empowerment exist and people/patients often go on the Web to search for health information. Such information is mainly obtained through generic search engines and it is often overwhelming, too generic, and of poor quality. Intelligent Empowering Agents (IEA) can filter such information and assist the user in the understanding of health information about specific complaints or health in general...

Medical data describe patient health information, both in healthy and disease conditions. In any case, health institutions need to ask for patient consent in order to provide their services. Patients usually give consent on a one-time basis, for a specific usage. Afterwards, if medical data usage is research, original patient consent does not apply and further consents should be required. On the other hand, provenance of medical data to verify the origin of health procedures is desirable, as digital health is increasing...

Welfare technology is expected to become a larger and more important part of the healthcare sector. This creates a need to understand, which information security risks welfare technology and affiliated devices are exposed to. In a scoping review, we present an extensive overview of relevant threats. Furthermore, some key vulnerabilities in health technologies like IoMTs and welfare technology devices are highlighted. In the conclusions, the risks relevant for welfare technology is discussed, where four top risks are emphasized as a result of the findings...