Digital Commons Network^™

Characterizing, Assessing And Improving Healthcare Referral Communication, Adol Esquivel

Dissertations & Theses (Open Access)

Similar to other health care processes, referrals are susceptible to breakdowns. These breakdowns in the referral process can lead to poor continuity of care, slow diagnostic processes, delays and repetition of tests, patient and provider dissatisfaction, and can lead to a loss of confidence in providers. These facts and the necessity for a deeper understanding of referrals in healthcare served as the motivation to conduct a comprehensive study of referrals.

The research began with the real problem and need to understand referral communication as a mean to improve patient care. Despite previous efforts to explain referrals and the dynamics and …

Unsupervised Indexing Of Medline Articles Through Graph-Based Ranking, Jorge R. Herskovic

Dissertations & Theses (Open Access)

The biomedical literature is extensively catalogued and indexed in MEDLINE. MEDLINE indexing is done by trained human indexers, who identify the most important concepts in each article, and is expensive and inconsistent. Automating the indexing task is difficult: the National Library of Medicine produces the Medical Text Indexer (MTI), which suggests potential indexing terms to the indexers. MTI’s output is not good enough to work unattended. In my thesis, I propose a different way to approach the indexing task called MEDRank. MEDRank creates graphs representing the concepts in biomedical articles and their relationships within the text, and applies graph-based ranking …

The Multiple Location Time Weighted Index: Using Patient Activity Spaces To Calculate Primary Care Service Areas, Jennifer Lynn Rankin

Dissertations & Theses (Open Access)

Geographic health planning analyses, such as service area calculations, are hampered by a lack of patient-specific geographic data. Using the limited patient address information in patient management systems, planners analyze patient origin based on home address. But activity space research done sparingly in public health and extensively in non-health related arenas uses multiple addresses per person when analyzing accessibility. Also, health care access research has shown that there are many non-geographic factors that influence choice of provider. Most planning methods, however, overlook non-geographic factors influencing choice of provider, and the limited data mean the analyses can only be related to …