Health Information Technology Commons^™

Development Of Recommendations For The Future Of Telehealth Use Among Sexual And Gender Minorities (Sgm), Jeffrey A. Wilhite

Dissertations and Theses

It is now well-documented that sexual and gender minoritized individuals (SGMs) face consistent stigmatization from not just the health care system, but also from overarching community, federal, and societal entities. Subsections of the SGM community, like gay men for example, face higher rates of eating disorders, certain cancers, alcoholism, mental illness and even obesity, when compared to heterosexual counterparts. Many of these challenges could be exacerbated by current political administration efforts to silence the community. Ensuring access to clinical care is one way of preserving the health and livelihood of the community. Telehealth, or synchronous, remote based clinical care, can …

A Hierarchical Decision Model To Evaluate Healthcare Organization's Readiness To Implement Clinical Decision Support Systems, Mohammed Oussama Laraichi

Dissertations and Theses

Clinical Decision Support Systems (CDSS) are essential tools for healthcare organizations as well as for healthcare providers to improve clinical care. However, successful implementation of CDSS can be challenging. Therefore, before implementing CDSS, it is crucial to assess the readiness of healthcare organizations to implement these tools.

Through a literature review, the first step of this research explores the concept of clinical decision support and CDSS, discussing their features, characteristics, and organizational hurdles to implementation. It also provides perspectives on CDSS adoption in the context of Information Systems and Health Technology. The review helped identify research gaps, objectives, and questions. …

Will Clinical Decision Support Mechanisms Reduce The Amount Of Unnecessary Computed Tomography?, Andrea Ciarmello

Dissertations and Theses

Clinical Decision Support Mechanisms (CDSMs) are to patient safety. When used in Radiology, CDSMs can improve radiation dose, quality assurance, and patient care. When paired with the electronic health record, CDSMs provide clinicians with patient-specific data that will help lower healthcare costs and improve patient outcomes. This study demonstrates how introducing clinical decision support mechanisms in electronic health record software will help improve unnecessary CT scans and hinder patient radiation exposure. The ordering physician can now consistently and reliably choose the proper scan each time.

Patient Frailty: A Review, Lakshmi Sailaja Kodavati

Dissertations and Theses

According to Geriator (2011), frailty is a common clinical syndrome in older adults that carries an increased risk for poor health outcomes such as falls, incident disability, hospitalization, and mortality. An operational definition of frailty is the existence of at least three out of five observable criteria indicating compromised energetics: low grip strength; low energy; slowed walking speed; low physical activity; and unintentional weight loss (Fried, et al. 2001).

According to Dubois and Charpillet (2017), most transitions into frailty are due to unintentional weight loss which, in turn, impacts gait performance and subsequent general mobility. In this literature review, the …

Improving National Health Management Information Systems: Stakeholder Views In Selected Sub-Saharan African Countries, Marie Donaldson

Dissertations and Theses

Background

Reliable, quality health information is the foundation of measurement and decision making in the health sector. Effective health management information systems can help improve the quality and coverage of health services, aid in policy development, support program implementation, and increase the likelihood that a well-trained health work force with the infrastructure and resources needed to provide appropriate health services will be properly distributed and supplied. There is widespread global agreement that data is a powerful tool. Arming Ministry of Health officials with better access to higher quality data that they know how to use can help improve health services …

Assessment Of The Blockchain Technology Adoption For The Management Of The Electronic Health Record Systems, Saeed Mohammed Alzahrani

Dissertations and Theses

Blockchain is an emerging technology that holds great promises in healthcare despite slow adoption and previous unsuccessful implementation projects. Blockchain adoption in healthcare has been slow, partly because healthcare is a heavily regulated and complex industry. Blockchain applications span various areas of healthcare such as patient data management, health information exchange, health supply chain management, financial and insurance claims, clinical trial, biomedical devices tracking, and pharmaceutical counterfeit. The main challenges with blockchain technology in healthcare are: scarcity of real applications, the high level of failing projects, and the need for various parties to function together. There is, however, a lack …

Development Of A Hospital Readmission Reduction Program For Patients Discharged To Skilled Nursing Facilities: An Application Of Artificial Intelligence And Machine Learning Techniques, Anna Stachel

Dissertations and Theses

Background

Hospital readmissions within 30 days after discharge have drawn national policy attention as they are a reflection of suboptimal patient care. Readmissions are costly, accounting for more than $17 billion in potentially avoidable Medicare expenditures - nearly 78% of readmissions may be avoidable. Rich electronic data from medical records, growing computing capacities, and open source machine learning algorithms offer new opportunities to predict patients at high risk for readmission and prevent readmission through focused interventions. Prediction models might also serve to provide a more nuanced context of patient characteristics that lead to variations in readmission rates. Furthermore, transitional care …

Finding Trends In Big City Health Issues With Data Visualization, Shridhar Kulkarni

Dissertations and Theses

In recent years, data visualization has become one of the most effective tools to understand and identify unseen features of the large datasets available. An open source data set available for health issues for big cities across the United States was obtained. There are numerous indicators presented in the dataset including Demographics, Chronic Health Diseases, Social and Economic Factors, Food Safety, Mortality Rates, Cancer and Life Expectancy Rates. The dataset encompassed myriad of demographics as well as specific data for a number of US cities. The data was explored in different methods in Data points in terms of the demographic …

Study Of Satisfaction Of Inpatient Discharge Based On Nurses’ Perceptions, Hong Lin

Dissertations and Theses

Patient satisfaction plays an important role in providing quality health care, and discharge satisfaction is part of overall patient satisfaction since it reveals how patients feel about their stay. In this paper, we evaluated inpatient discharge satisfaction based on nurses’ perceptions. An anonymous survey was used to evaluate how satisfied the patients were when being discharged from the acute care hospital with survey questions answered by nurses who work on medical-surgical floors. Data was collected from the questionnaires and analyzed using Excel.

Towards Wide Implementation Of Dance Therapy In Mental Health, Pin-Wen Chou

Dissertations and Theses

In recent years, Dance Movement Therapy (DMT) has been increasingly mentioned in the field of mental health counseling. Despite the progress of DMT in terms of studies showing its efficiency for various forms of mental health conditions such as depression and trauma, the implementation of DMT amongst mental health therapists is still not as widespread as other forms of therapies such as verbal and art therapies. In this project, we aim to determine the underlying causes of its low implementation by surveying a set of populations, specifically mental health patients, mental health therapists that do not specialize in dance/movement therapy, …

Physical Therapy With Adjunct Therapies In Patients With Chronic Pain And Disability Post-Motor Vehicle Accidents, Lakshmi Subramanian

Dissertations and Theses

This project is a thorough literature review of studies concerning physical therapy interventions in conjunction with adjunct treatments for patients post-motor vehicle accidents focused on the therapy’s efficacy as related to functional outcome measures. Physical therapy is frequently treatment of choice for patients after minor motor vehicle accidents. However, most patients seek concomitant therapies like acupuncture, chiropractic, epidural steroid injection, and psychological counselling. This paper seeks to gather data on the efficacy of different treatment modalities when used in conjunction with each other. Often patients are traumatised or develop anxiety about driving requiring counselling and therapy. The vast majority of …

Chronic Migraine: Role Of Cgrp Antagonists And Botox, Gabriella Hassan

Dissertations and Theses

Chronic migraine (CM) is characterized by the International Headache Society classification (ICHD-3) as headache that occurs for greater than or equal to 15 days a month, lasting 4 or more hours. For chronic migraine patients, the goal with prophylactic treatment is to prevent future attacks and reduce the migraine frequency and severity. OnabotulinumtoxinA is the most universally accepted medication for the treatment of chronic migraine; and if successful, reduces migraine frequency up to 50%. The goal of CGRP (Calcitonin-gene-related peptide) antagonists is to reduce the frequency of chronic migraines by targeting the CGRP protein that is elevated during a migraine …

Perception Of Healthcare Providers On Mirror Therapy For Stroke, Dhwani Kamlesh Doshi

Dissertations and Theses

Stroke is a very important health problem faced worldwide with high mortality and incidence. The majority of stroke survivors suffer temporary or permanent disabilities of which hemiparesis is one of the most common. Hemiparesis makes it difficult for patients to perform their activities of daily living and often they have declining quality of life. Mirror therapy (MT) is a an inexpensive, easy and safe intervention which has been proven to be very effective to improve the motor function in hemiparetic stroke. Despite this, it is not often employed. Hence, the purpose of this study was to explore the awareness and …

Digital Dentistry- The Future Of Oral Health, Vidhi Shah

Dissertations and Theses

Background and objective: In the digital world, dentistry appears to be at least a decade behind in adopting the latest technologies in comparison to consumer electronics, biomedical engineering and aeronautics. However, recently, dental professionals have experienced the evolution of the dental profession as technological growth. Digital dentistry is the future of dentistry, and it will be essential to adopt and integrate technology into practice to improve the quality of care. The new generation of digital dentistry opens the exploration of innovations and advancement in technologies which will dramatically impact and improve all of dentistry. The objective of this paper is …

Can The Kanban Technique Reduce Medical Errors?, Juhi Hegde

Dissertations and Theses

This study discusses common medical errors and the extent of harm caused in the United States and explores the application of the Kanban technique of Lean Management in the healthcare industry to reduce medical errors. It also describes various scenarios of how the visual scheduling/ signaling system has been incorporated for continuous process improvement in the clinical and non-clinical sectors of the industry based on several review articles. Furthermore, a survey study was performed in order to assess whether ‘Kanban Visual Management System’ utilization in healthcare has the ability to reduce medical errors. A convenience sample of healthcare providers was …

Analysis Of Delays In Processing Times In An Ophthalmology Clinic, Kai Yung Natalie Lui

Dissertations and Theses

Efficiency is an important component of any medical practice. It facilitates quality care, reduction in wait time, patient and staff satisfaction, and decreased cost. The purpose of this study was to identify bottlenecks in the current processing system in the Eye Center at Hershey Penn State Medical Center. Data was obtained about patients arriving at the clinic for ancillary tests such as visual field testing and retinal imaging. Analysis of this data revealed a statistically significant longer average length of visit for patients who received testing in comparison to those who did not. However, due to the small sample size …

Automatic Optimum Atlas Selection For Multi-Atlas Image Segmentation Using Joint Label Fusion, Kofi Agyeman

Dissertations and Theses

Multi-atlas image segmentation using label fusion is one of the most accurate state of the art image segmentation techniques available for biomedical imaging applications. Motivated to achieve higher image segmentation accuracy, reduce computational costs and a continuously increasing atlas data size, a robust framework for optimum selection of atlases for label fusion is vital. Although believed not to be critical for weighted label fusion techniques by some works (Sabuncu, M. R. et al., 2010, [1]), others have shown that appropriate atlas selection has several merits and can improve multi-atlas image segmentation accuracy (Aljabar et al., 2009, [2], Van de Velde …

The Effects Of Training At Two Specified Intensities Upon Heart Rate Response To Submaximal Exercise, Gordon Leverne Noraine

Dissertations and Theses

The relationship between training intensities and fitness gains was selected as a topic for analysis in this study. Forty-six college men served as subjects in one of three groups: a jogging, or moderate intensity, training group, a running, or high intensity, training group, or a control group. All subjects were pre- and post-tested on the Astrand Bike Ergometer Work Test where working heart rates were measured and recorded. The two training groups participated in at least thirteen training sessions between these testing days, in which two miles were covered at the correct intensity level for each subject at each training …