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Pronto Fácil: A software for Patient Data and Health Service Management for Clinical Psychologists
Introduction: Clinical and management data need to be stored in a manner that allows easy, safe and real time access. Objective: Develop a software for patient data and health service management for use on clinical psychologists’ smartphones, tablets and computers. Method: This research used applied technology production for software application development, and was carried out in five steps: (1) Preliminary survey; (2) Target public contact retrieval and pilot research; (3) Definition of the development’s basic aspects and questionnaire preparation for final research; (4) Initial development, beta testing and final questionnaire; (5) Development of the application’s final version. Results: (1) Low records registration and methods used by clinical psychologists. (2) Reasons for low records registration and helping factors to change this. (3) Chosen a software language which was able to be used as platform independent when developing to Windows, Android and iOS, easy-to-read text fonts for everyone, pleasant colours and intuitive user interface. (4) First software version, group of testers and final questionnaire. (5) Application is able to manage patient records and appointments, together with financial and tax registries, and tax collection formularies. Conclusion: The proposed psychological records strategy has resulted in a key factor to tackle the barriers raised against recording psychological treatment in medical records, being also a great ally for private practices’ management, as clinical psychologists, liked the versatility in handling and scope, such as appointments, registration of clinical records and financial control. The application will be freely available on Microsoft Store for Windows 10 users and in the future on Play Store (Android)
Two Years of Experience in Implementation of the mobiREH Remote Rehabilitation System Supporting Patients and Physiotherapists
The aim of this work is to characterise the process of developing the mobiREH telemedical rehabilitation system which was created as a result of cooperation between the mReh start-up team and the scientific team from the Academy of Physical Education in Kraków. The most significant global and local challenges for rehabilitative health services are: the increasing number of patients awaiting rehabilitation, the increasing waiting time for rehabilitation, and the decreasing number of medical specialists. A mobiREH rehabilitation system is a system that supports home based rehabilitation and helps resolve these problems. The system consists of (a) a mobile application, (b) wearable sensors for patients, and (c) a web-based platform for medical specialists
Experimentation of ‘Link for Health’, a new Telehealth application in Cochin Hospital, France
Orange and Cochin Hospital have experimented ‘Link for Health’, a new Telehealth application in the Department of Oncology of Cochin Hospital, France.This new application allows a complete Telehealth service combining mobile application, sensors and questionnaires to return by internet to healthcare team.The purpose of this paper is to analyse and experiment the effectiveness of the Telehealth service, in oral and intravenous anti-cancer therapy to improve clinical and process outcomes.Results were analysed in terms of benefits for the patients and the hospital team
Management of Standardised, Interoperable Clinical Registries: Visioning Quality of Care and Clinical Research
Objective: To describe the implementation of a hospital sector dedicated to conduct clinical registries. Methods and Results: In 2014 a Sector was founded in the Clinical Research Centre specifically to design and manage clinical registries. Over the past two years we have participated in many adult and paediatric multicentre studies as a site collecting data, and have designed and implemented 14 clinical registries, including local and multicentre studies. The clinical registries include in-hospital and outpatient studies on acute myocardial infarction, cardiovascular rehabilitation, systemic hypertension, pacemaker and implantable cardioverter defibrillator, electrophysiology and ablation procedures, heart failure, cardiac transplantation, percutaneous cardiac intervention for left main coronary artery stenosis, percutaneous cardiac intervention with drug eluting stents, paediatric systemic hypertension, infectious endocarditis, clinical trials patients, paediatric cardiovascular prevention and adult cardiovascular surgery. The databases were built taking into consideration national and international standardised data elements to allow for interoperability among datasets, clinical and research workflows, and are in accordance with the HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act) privacy rule. Currently, these registries hold data on more than five thousand patients. Integration with other clinical and costs datasets within institutions are underway. Data are used for quality assistance control and research. Conclusion: The Clinical Registry Sector has provided data for measuring quality of care and effectiveness. Additionally, the methodology used for building the clinical registries allow for interoperability among systems maximising the potential of its use
Telepsychiatry - From a Dream to Reality in Bangladesh
The governments of Low and Middle Income Countries are struggling with poverty, political instability, social inequality and inadequate health care facilities. Mental health services never get adequate attention to overcome all of these priority issues. These countries are stressed with a wide mental health treatment gap and there is no sign of adequate initiatives to minimise this gap. However, Information Communication Technologies (ICT) sectors show explosive growth. The landscape of ICT in the health sector is expanding every day. Most developing countries have no national mental health data base or electronic health record. With the help of ICT countries can collect real time data, and record the data from mobile devices in a cost effective manner. The problem of lack of trained mental health professionals, wide geographic area coverage and the large number of patients can be overcome by using telepsychiatry services. People can contact a psychiatrist or psychologist from their mobile phone whenever they need help. It removes the cost of travelling, the need to wait for an appointment and avoids the fear of being stigmatised as being mentally ill. Electronic algorithm based diagnostic systems provide professional expertise and can assist poorly trained personnel in primary care settings. Millions of people can be contacted at a time using Short Message Service (SMS), Interactive voice response (IVR) and video clips. This can be used to reduce the stigma and improve treatment adherence, two important obstacles in mental health service in low income counties. Social Networking Sites like Facebook have opened new horizons for understanding mental health conditions and providing interventions. Friendsourcing is interesting area to for mental health. All these aspect can transform mental health in Low and Middle Income Countries with their available resources
A Framework to Develop Intelligent Agents to Support Sentiment Analysis”
Many people including elderly people now live alone with a high tendency toward depression diseases including loneliness. Most of the times social networks are their unique way of expressing their sentiments and speaking freely about their feelings and intentions. However their posts are mostly seen by non-specialists and important information is lost or the adequate reaction is not provided. The aim of this paper is to propose a framework for developing intelligent agents that will be trained to crawl the social networks, to analyse sentiments according with posted expressions which will be classified according with an ontology of emoticons and send alerts to a specialist who will provide the adequate psychologic and social support. These intelligent agents can work like a team, developing collaboration work and developing skills and competences similar to Darwin’s theory of biological evolution. The expressions’ classification will be a priori annotated by a panel of experts and these annotation will be used to train the intelligent agents. The system will also use an ontology not only to reason the concepts but also to find new association of terms and expressions that will be presented to the experts to get their classifications. The final outcomes will be an evolutive eco system of intelligent agents capable of gathering knowledge and using their competences to analyse sentiments according to an ontology of emotions The proposed framework is based on a literature review, technological state of the art and includes the global architecture, technology and implementation training to get a fully functional system. Some foundation concepts, methods and technologies will be reused in this framework including emotion ontology, and ontology editor Protégé, a text mining information extractor and classifier and a platform to develop intelligent agents, JADE
Towards an improvement of patient safety: A framework for Clinical Decision Support Systems
Patient safety is a very important issue. The patient’s expectations are a correct diagnosis and an efficient and effective treatment plan, while healthcare providers are balancing costs with the quality of the services. The payers are interested to getting the maximum return for their investments and operational costs. All these issues point to the fact that healthcare providers should follow best practices and resources allocation of resources must be planned according to the predicted needs. Clinical Decision Support Systems (CDSS) can recommend practices according to accepted guidelines that have been previously defined, validated and approved and these systems should be the “compass” for health professionals. The guidelines should be uploaded to the health facility computer systems and written in languages that can be shareable and processed by different software applications. This paper presents a case study that includes a review of the main features of a syntax to describe clinical guidelines and a framework of concepts, methodologies and technologies to improve the clinical decision support systems (CDSS).
Cognitive justice and the higher education curriculum
This article is set against the backdrop of calls for the decolonisation of the curriculum in higher education institutions in South Africa. It is an attempt to contribute towards the debate on decolonising the curriculum, with a focus on the tasks of academics and academic developers. The first half of the article outlines several key aspects of current theorising about academic development or teaching and learning in higher education, informed by more general debates about education. These aspects limit the potential to imagine a more inclusive or socially just, decolonised curriculum. The second half of the article proposes cognitive justice as a useful concept to lead thinking about how to change the curriculum. It discusses what cognitive justice is and how this intersects with writing on decolonisation. It outlines some of the gaps in this conceptualisation, which would need more attention if this concept were to be useful to take the process of transforming teaching and learning forward
The ‘Politics’ of South African Indian Identity: Real or Imagined
Bhana (2001) and Landy, Maharaj and Mainet-Valleix (2004) argue that people of Indian origin have lost much of their ancestral legacy as they became South Africans over the last 140 years. Using a largely qualitative lens this paper explores whether Indian cultural identifiers influence South African Indian identity and concludes with the voices of respondents showing a hybrid cultural model instead of an exclusively Indian identity model. The hybrid model is informed by especially second and third generation respondents’ exposure to Western and African influences. Data for this paper were produced from 21 face to face interviews with three generations of South African Indians in the Metropolitan Area of Durban
Fatima Meer’s ‘Train from Hyderabad’: Diaspora, Social Justice, Gender and Political Intervention
Fatima Meer’s memoir, Prison Diary: One Hundred and Thirteen Days, 1976 (2001), and the short story ‘Train to Hyderabad’ (Meer 2010) as an anthologised entity drawn from it, symbolise women’s isolation under male scrutiny, male rage at female autonomy and the compulsion to gag female critique of male government whether domestic, provincial or national. Behind the historical fact of colonial pseudo-slavery termed indenture, which was not gender-specific, lies the surviving, wide-spread and less-recognised phenomenon of female subjugation which may be termed female indenture. This reading of ‘Train to Hyderabad’ re-enacts a liberatory process: freeing the text in a way which reflects Meer’s own scripting of her work in a pattern of self-denial and socialist concern for the oppressed about her