Health Information Technology Commons^™

Customising Doctor-Nurse Communications, Brian Cusack, Dave Parry

Australian eHealth Informatics and Security Conference

Doctor-Nurse communications are critical for patient safety and workflow effectiveness. Our research question was: What further improvements can be made to current communication systems? A variety of mobile and land based communication systems have been used and experimented with. In the study, the pager was found to be most common and more recent attempts to provide broadband capability with systems such as the iBeep. We built an alternative information system using Android phones and a software application that was customised by feedback from the medical professionals. The trial in five wards with 22 doctors and 170 nurses over one month …

Security Of Electronic Health Records In A Resource Limited Setting: The Case Of Smart-Care Electronic Health Record In Zambia, Keith Mweebo

Australian eHealth Informatics and Security Conference

This paper presents a case study of security issues related to the operationalization of smart-care, an electronic medical record (EMR) used to manage Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) health information in Zambia. The aim of the smart-care program is to link up services and improve access to health information, by providing a reliable way to collect, store, retrieve and analyse health data in a secure way. As health professionals gain improved access to patient health information electronically, there is need to ensure this information is secured, and that patient privacy and confidentiality is maintained. During the initial stages of the program …

The Potentials And Challenges Of Big Data In Public Health, Rena N. Vithiatharan

Australian eHealth Informatics and Security Conference

The potential to use big data sources for public health increases with the broadening availability of data and improved methods of analysis. Whilst there are some well-known examples of the opportunistic use of big data, such as GoogleFlu, public health has not yet realised the full potential of such data sources. A literature review was undertaken to identify the potential of such data collections to impact public health, and to identify what challenges are currently limiting this potential. The potential include improved real-time analysis, research and development and genome studies. However, challenges listed are poor universal standardisation and classification, privacy …

Byod In Ehealth: Herding Cats And Stable Doors, Or A Catastrophe Waiting To Happen?, Krishnun Sansurooh, Patricia A H Williams

Australian eHealth Informatics and Security Conference

The use of personal devices in the work environment has crossed the boundaries of work and socially related tasks. With cyber criminals seriously targeting healthcare for medical identity theft, the lack of control of new technologies within healthcare networks becomes an increasing vulnerability. The prolific adoption of personal mobile devices in the healthcare environment requires a proactive approach to the management of Bring Your Own Device (BYOD). This paper analysed the current state of the problem and the challenges that this creates in an environment that has stringent privacy and security requirements. The discourse demonstrates that the issue is not …

3rd Australian Ehealth Informatics And Security Conference, 2014, Edith Cowan University: Conference Details, Security Research Institute, Edith Cowan University

Australian eHealth Informatics and Security Conference

No abstract provided.

Big Data In Healthcare: What Is It Used For?, Rebecca Hermon, Patricia A H Williams

Australian eHealth Informatics and Security Conference

Big data analytics is a growth area with the potential to provide useful insight in healthcare. Whilst many dimensions of big data still present issues in its use and adoption, such as managing the volume, variety, velocity, veracity, and value, the accuracy, integrity, and semantic interpretation are of greater concern in clinical application. However, such challenges have not deterred the use and exploration of big data as an evidence source in healthcare. This drives the need to investigate healthcare information to control and reduce the burgeoning cost of healthcare, as well as to seek evidence to improve patient outcomes. Whilst …

Avoiding Epic Fails: Software And Standards Directions To Increase Clinical Safety, Patricia A H Williams, Vincent B. Mccauley

Australian eHealth Informatics and Security Conference

No abstract provided.

Managing Wireless Security Risks In Medical Services, Brian Cusack, Akar Kyaw

Australian eHealth Informatics and Security Conference

Medical systems are designed for a range of end users from different professional skill groups and people who carry the devices in and on their bodies. Open, accurate, and efficient communication is the priority for medical systems and consequently strong protection costs are traded against the utility benefits for open systems. In this paper we assess the vulnerabilities created by the professional and end user expectations, and theorise ways to mitigate wireless security vulnerabilities. The benefits of wireless medical services are great in terms of efficiencies, mobility, and information management. These benefits may be realised by treating the vulnerabilities and …

Gpu-Accelerated Influenza Simulations For Operational Modeling, Peter Holvenstot

Masters Theses

Simulations of influenza spread are useful for decision-making during public-health emergencies. Policy-makers use models to predict disease spread and estimate the effects of various intervention strategies. Effective modeling of targeted intervention strategies requires accurate modeling of individual-level behavior and transmission. However, this greatly increases the computational costs of these agent-based models. In addition, if the models are used as an outbreak progresses, some operational decisions must occur rapidly in order to contain the spread of the disease.

Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) are a type of specialized processor used to drive graphical displays. Many recent devices also allow users to write …

Automated Prediction Of Glasgow Outcome Scale For Traumatic Brain Injury, Bolan Su, Thien Anh Dinh, A. K. Ambastha, Tianxia Gong, Tomi Silander, Shijian Lu, C. C. Tchoyoson Lim, Boon Chuan Pang, Cheng Kiang Lee, Tze-Yun Leong, Chew Lim Tan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Clinical features found in brain CT scan images are widely used in traumatic brain injury (TBI) as indicators for Glasgow Outcome Scale (GOS) prediction. However, due to the lack of automated methods to measure and quantify the CT scan image features, the computerized prediction of GOS in TBI has not been well studied. This paper introduces an automated GOS prediction system for traumatic brain CT images. Different from most existing systems that perform the prognosis based on pre-processed data, our system directly works on brain CT scan images based on the image features. Our system can also be extended to …

Libraries Respond To Mobile Ubiquity: Research And Assessment Of Mobile Device Usage Trends For Academic And Medical Libraries, Megan M. Hurst, Eleanor I. Cook, J. Michael Lindsay, Martha F. Earl

Charleston Library Conference

The authors consider trends in mobile device usage for the Internet as a whole, for EBSCO Discovery Service across all client libraries, and at two specific libraries: Preston Medical Library, serving the University of Tennessee (UT) Graduate School of Medicine and UT Medical Center, and the Joyner Library at East Carolina University, serving students and faculty on the main campus. Librarians at Preston Medical Library conducted a survey to determine which mobile devices, platforms, and apps were used by their patrons in 2012. East Carolina University piloted an iPad and e-reader lending program in 2010–2011. The results of each are …

Medical Imaging Specialists And 3d: A Domain Perspective On Mobile 3d Interactions, Teddy Seyed, Frank Maurer, Francisco Marinho Rodrigues, Anthony Tang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

3D volumetric medical images, such as MRIs, are commonly explored and interacted with by medical imaging experts using systems that require keyboard and mouse-based techniques. These techniques have presented challenges for medical imaging specialists: 3D spatial navigation is difficult, in addition to the detailed selection and analysis of 3D medical images being difficult due to depth perception and occlusion issues. In this work, we explore a potential solution to these challenges by using tangible interaction techniques with a mobile device to simplify 3D interactions for medical imaging specialists. We discuss preliminary observations from our design sessions with medical imaging specialists …

Situational Awareness/Triage Tool For Use In A Chemical, Biological, Radiological Nuclear Explosive (Cbrne) Environment, John N. Scarlett, Heather L. Gallup, David A. Smith

AFIT Patents

A method of managing patient care and emergency response following a Chemical, Biological, Radiological, or Nuclear Explosive (CBRNE) attack and maintaining compliance with the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA). The method including identifying each patient with a unique patient identifier, the identifier based upon the geospatial location of the patient, the geospatial location including at least the latitude and longitude of the patient when first treated, the unique patient identifier being part of patient data. Providing a collection point of patient data to form a patient data database where in the patient location data may be used to …

Consumer Adoption Of Health Information Systems, Sankara Subramanian Srinivasan

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

At nearly 18 percent of the country's GDP, the U.S. healthcare industry continues to wrestle with growing cost and a quality of care that does not match the increased spending. The dominant focus to date has been on promoting Health IT (HIT) system implementation and digitizing health records at the provider's end, with scant attention to the role of the patient in the healthcare process. The source of inefficiency in the healthcare system is not only on account of shortcomings at the provider's end but also due to non-compliance (such as failing to adhere to medication advice and follow-up visits) …

Flexiterm: A Flexible Term Recognition Method, Irena Spasić, Mark Greenwood, Alun Preece, Nick Francis, Glyn Elwyn

Dartmouth Scholarship

Background: The increasing amount of textual information in biomedicine requires effective term recognition methods to identify textual representations of domain-specific concepts as the first step toward automating its semantic interpretation. The dictionary look-up approaches may not always be suitable for dynamic domains such as biomedicine or the newly emerging types of media such as patient blogs, the main obstacles being the use of non-standardised terminology and high degree of term variation.

Online Survey System For Image-Based Clinical Guideline Studies Using The Delphi Method, Todd Martin Harper

Theses and Dissertations

The increasing use of health information technology (HIT) is due to a rising interest in improving the quality of health care. HIT has the potential to reduce cost and transform services. Proper clinical support systems will contribute to the meaningful use of HIT systems by providing a wide array of data to clinicians for the diagnosis and treatments. Clinical guidelines, created by a consensus of experts, can be put in place to assist physicians in making clinical decisions. Delphi methods are commonly used to create consensus from surveys completed by a team of experts. Image-based studies could create guidelines that …

Data Mining The Functional Characterizations Of Proteins To Predict Their Cancer-Relatedness, Peter Revesz, Christopher Assi

School of Computing: Faculty Publications

This paper considers two types of protein data. First, data about protein function described in a number of ways, such as, GO terms and PFAM families. Second, data about whether individual proteins are experimentally associated with cancer by an anomalous elevation or lowering of their expressions within cancerous cells. We combine these two types of protein data and test whether the first type of data, that is, the functional descriptors, can predict the second type of data, that is, cancer-relatedness. By using data mining and machine learning, we derive a classifier algorithm that using only GO term and PFAM family …

Data Mining Of Pancreatic Cancer Protein Databases, Peter Revesz, Christopher Assi

School of Computing: Conference and Workshop Papers

Data mining of protein databases poses special challenges because many protein databases are non- relational whereas most data mining and machine learning algorithms assume the input data to be a type of rela- tional database that is also representable as an ARFF file. We developed a method to restructure protein databases so that they become amenable for various data mining and machine learning tools. Our restructuring method en- abled us to apply both decision tree and support vector machine classifiers to a pancreatic protein database. The SVM classifier that used both GO term and PFAM families to characterize proteins gave …

An Automated Pathological Class Level Annotation System For Volumetric Brain Images, Thien Anh Dinh, Tomi Silander, C. C. Tchoyoson Lim, Tze-Yun Leong

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

We introduce an automated, pathological class level annotation system for medical volumetric brain images. While much of the earlier work has mainly focused on annotating regions of interest in medical images, our system does not require annotated region level training data nor assumes perfect segmentation results for the regions of interest; the time and effort needed for acquiring training data are hence significantly reduced. This capability of handling high-dimensional noisy data, however, poses additional technical challenges, since statistical estimation of models for such data is prone to over-fitting. We propose a framework that combines a regularized logistic regression method and …

Genetic Studies Of Complex Human Diseases: Characterizing Snp-Disease Associations Using Bayesian Networks, Bing Han, Xue-Wen Chen, Zohreh Talebizadeh, Hua Xu

Wayne State University Associated BioMed Central Scholarship

Abstract

Background

Detecting epistatic interactions plays a significant role in improving pathogenesis, prevention, diagnosis, and treatment of complex human diseases. Applying machine learning or statistical methods to epistatic interaction detection will encounter some common problems, e.g., very limited number of samples, an extremely high search space, a large number of false positives, and ways to measure the association between disease markers and the phenotype.

Results

To address the problems of computational methods in epistatic interaction detection, we propose a score-based Bayesian network structure learning method, EpiBN, to detect epistatic interactions. We apply the proposed method to both simulated datasets and …

Cycles Of Electronic Health Records Adaptation By Physicians: How Do The Positive And Negative Experience With The Ehr System Affect Physicians' Ehr Adaptation Process?, Cherie Noteboom, Dhundy Bastola, Sajda Qureshi

Research & Publications

The integration of EHR in IT infrastructures supporting organizations enable improved access and recording of patient data, enhanced ability to make improved decisions, improved quality and reduced errors in patient care. Despite these benefits, there are mixed results as to the use of EHR. The literature suggests that the reasons for the limited use relate to policy, financial and usability considerations, but it does not provide an understanding of reasons for physicians’ limited interaction and adaptation of EHR.

Following an analysis of qualitative data, collected in a case study at a hospital using interviews, this research explains how physicians interact …

Framework To Secure Cloud-Based Medical Image Storage And Management System Communications, Timothy James Rostrom

Theses and Dissertations

Picture Archiving and Communication Systems (PACS) have been traditionally constrained to the premises of the healthcare provider. This has limited the availability of these systems in many parts of the world and mandated major costs in infrastructure for those who employ them. Public cloud services could be a solution that eases the cost of ownership and provides greater flexibility for PACS implementations. This could make it possible to bring medical imaging services to places where it was previously unavailable and reduce the costs associated with these services for those who utilize them. Moving these systems to public cloud infrastructure requires …

Discussion Of "Biomedical Ontologies: Toward Scientific Debate", Brochhausen M., Burgun A., Ceusters W., Hasman A., Tze-Yun Leong, Musen M., Oliveira J., Peleg M., Rector A., Schulz S.

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

With these comments on the paper “Biomedical Ontologies: Toward scientific debate”, written by Victor Maojo et al., Methods of Information in Medicine wants to stimulate a discussion on advantages and challenges of biomedical ontologies. An international group of experts have been invited by the editor of Methods to comment on this paper. Each of the invited commentaries forms one section of this paper.

Network Security: Privacy-Preserving Data Publication: A Review On “Updates” In Continuous Data Publication, Adeel Anjum, Guillaume Raschia

International Conference on Information and Communication Technologies

Preserving the privacy of individuals while publishing their relevant data has been an important problem. Most of previous works in privacy preserving data publication focus on one time, static release of datasets. In multiple publications however, where data is published multiple times, these techniques are unable to ensure privacy of the concerned individuals as just joining either of the releases could result in identity disclosure. In this work, we tried to investigate the major findings in the scenario of continuous data publication, in which the data is not only published multiple times but also modified with INSERTS, UPDATES and DELETE …

An Evaluation Of The Usability Of A Computerized Decision Support System For Nursing Homes, M. Fossum, M. Ehnfors, Ann L. Fruhling, A. Ehrenberg

Interdisciplinary Informatics Faculty Publications

Background: Computerized decision support systems (CDSSs) have the potential to significantly improve the quality of nursing care of older people by enhancing the decision making of nursing personnel. Despite this potential, health care organizations have been slow to incorporate CDSSs into nursing home practices.

Objective: This study describes facilitators and barriers that impact the ability of nursing personnel to effectively use a clinical CDSS for planning and treating pressure ulcers (PUs) and malnutrition and for following the suggested risk assessment guidelines for the care of nursing home residents.

Methods: We employed a qualitative descriptive design using varied …

Medially: A Provenance-Aware Remote Health Monitoring Middleware, Atanu Roy Chowdhury, Ben Falchuk, Archan Misra

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This paper presents MediAlly, a middleware for supporting energy-efficient, long-term remote health monitoring. Data is collected using physiological sensors and transported back to the middleware using a smart phone. The key to MediAlly's energy efficient operations lies in the adoption of an Activity Triggered Deep Monitoring (ATDM) paradigm, where data collection episodes are triggered only when the subject is determined to possess a specified context. MediAlly supports the on-demand collection of contextual provenance using a novel low-overhead provenance collection sub-system. The behaviour of this sub-system is configured using an application-defined context composition graph. The resulting provenance stream provides valuable insight …

Teleoph: A Secure Real-Time Teleophthalmology System, Yongdong Wu, Zhou Wei, Haixia Yao, Zhigang Zhao, Lek Heng Ngoh, Robert H. Deng, Shengsheng Yu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Teleophthalmology (TeleOph) is an electronic counterpart of today's face-to-face, patient-to-specialist ophthalmology system. It enables one or more ophthalmologists to remotely examine a patient's condition via a confidential and authentic communication channel. Specifically, TeleOph allows a trained nonspecialist in a primary clinic to screen the patients with digital instruments (e.g., camera, ophthalmoscope). The acquired medical data are delivered to the hospital where an ophthalmologist will review the data collected and, if required, provide further consultation for the patient through a real-time secure channel established over a public Internet network. If necessary, the ophthalmologist is able to further sample the images/video of …

Application Of Ict Iii: Use Of Information And Mobile Computing Technologies In Healthcare Facilities Of Saudi Arabia, Abdul Ahad Siddiqi, Munir Ahmed, Yasser M. Alginahi, Abdulrahman Alharby

International Conference on Information and Communication Technologies

Information technology forms an important part of the healthcare solution. Accurate and up-to-date information is essential to continuous quality improvement in any organization, and particularly so in an area as complex as healthcare. Therefore, diverse information systems must be integrated across the healthcare enterprise. The knowledge base in the medical field is large, complex, and growing rapidly. It includes scientific knowledge, as well as familiarity with the day-to-day business of providing healthcare. It is crucial to identify the processes in the healthcare sector that would most benefit from the support of information technology. This study is focused on the analysis …

The Influence Of Affect, Attitude And Usefulness In The Acceptance Of Telemedicine Systems, Soussan Djamasbi,, Ann L. Fruhling, Eleanor T. Loiacono

Information Systems and Quantitative Analysis Faculty Publications

Grounded in current theories of affect this study examines the role positive and negative moods play on the acceptance of a specialized telemedicine system for microbiology consultation and diagnostics, referred to as telepathology. From a laboratory experiment using microbiology laboratory assistants, the notion that healthcare users’ attitude is an important factor in the acceptance behavior of a healthcare information system is supported. A regression analysis of the data revealed the need to tailor the IS Technology Acceptance Model for the healthcare field. Specifically, our results show that ease of use which is thought to be a main antecedent of end-user …

Droid: The Drosophila Interactions Database, A Comprehensive Resource For Annotated Gene And Protein Interactions, Jingkai Yu, Svetlana Pacifico, Guozhen Liu, Russell L. Finley Jr

Wayne State University Associated BioMed Central Scholarship

Abstract

Background

Charting the interactions among genes and among their protein products is essential for understanding biological systems. A flood of interaction data is emerging from high throughput technologies, computational approaches, and literature mining methods. Quick and efficient access to this data has become a critical issue for biologists. Several excellent multi-organism databases for gene and protein interactions are available, yet most of these have understandable difficulty maintaining comprehensive information for any one organism. No single database, for example, includes all available interactions, integrated gene expression data, and comprehensive and searchable gene information for the important model organism, Drosophila melanogaster. …