Predictive Modeling in Action: How 'Virtual Wards' Help High-Risk Patients Receive Hospital Care at Home

Describes a program to reduce hospitalizations by providing multidisciplinary case management and coordinated preventive care at home to chronic disease patients found to be at risk of emergency hospitalization by predictive modeling. Outlines challenges

Panel on future challenges in modeling methodology

This panel paper presents the views of six researchers and practitioners of simulation modeling. Collectively we attempt to address a range of key future challenges to modeling methodology. It is hoped that the views of this paper, and the presentations made by the panelists at the 2004 Winter Simulation Conference will raise awareness and stimulate further discussion on the future of modeling methodology in areas such as modeling problems in business applications, human factors and geographically dispersed networks; rapid model development and maintenance; legacy modeling approaches; markup languages; virtual interactive process design and simulation; standards; and Grid computing

Management of e-Resources in R amp; D Centers: A Case Study of the Information Center at NAL13;

The developments in information technology and their applications to library and information services have given new dimension to the entire spectrum of information management. The information generated is usually stored in four physical media: paper, film, optical, and magnetic disks. The e-document be it a book, journal, technical report, conference proceedings is portable; has random access to its contents; and the document can also be a multimedia object, in that it may contain not only text, but also graphics, drawings, photographs or video. Now we have the emergence of publications over the electronic networks and the activity took off in a big way following the invention of the World Wide Web. The Open Access movement is becoming the order of the day. More than 3000 journals are free on net for anybody to access. A number of Institutional repositories and e-Prints archives have thrown challenge to the publishing industry. Consortium approach through different pricing, management and licensing models is enabling the libraries to provide access to thousands of e- journals, e-books and other kinds of e-documents. The Information center at NAL with its state-of-the-art library has progressed a good deal in this direction by acquiring different kind of documents especially e-form, cataloguing amp; processing them appropriately, storing and giving access to its patrons not only in library premises, but on to the desk tops spread in three different campuses through laboratory LAN and also extending selected services through Internet for the benefit of any body from any part of the world. 13; Created and maintained by ICAST the Portal x2018;AeroInfox2019; (www.aeroinfo.org.in) serves as one window information search facility for Web sources in aerospace science and technology. This virtual library facilitates multiple approach to information seekers as the web sources are indexed and organised using different schemes of classification including NASA subject categories. Care is taken to cover Indian aerospace sources exhaustively. The ICAST site (www.icast.org.in), apart from giving detailed information about library sources including books, journals, E-journals, databases and technical reports makes available different search tools for its users. Other details like working hours, library rules, staff details, contact persons, etc are provided. One can submit an online query and suggest documents for acquisition using online forms provided. The Library Database (OPAC) is probably is single largest in the country with more than 3.25 lakh bibliographic records of books, technical reports, patents, standards, journals, etc. ICAST users can search International databases like Aerospace Database, NTIS, J-Gate, Medline, etc through campus LAN. Users can access more than 2500 full text journals covering titles published by Elsevier (ScienceDirect), ASME, AIAA, Springer, John Wiley, OUP, CUP, AMS, World Scientific, few Annual Series, etc. Created by ICAST an e-journals gateway with browse and search (alphabetical and subject wise) facility for titles provides access to more than 700 journals available free on the net. The Centre provides a number of web/e-mail based innovative information services including Journal Contents Service, News Clipping Service, Monthly Documents Additions Lists covering both Books and Technical Reports, Web Alert Service and Union Catalogue of Journals -CSIR and Aerospace Libraries, etc

Development of Grid e-Infrastructure in South-Eastern Europe

Over the period of 6 years and three phases, the SEE-GRID programme has established a strong regional human network in the area of distributed scientific computing and has set up a powerful regional Grid infrastructure. It attracted a number of user communities and applications from diverse fields from countries throughout the South-Eastern Europe. From the infrastructure point view, the first project phase has established a pilot Grid infrastructure with more than 20 resource centers in 11 countries. During the subsequent two phases of the project, the infrastructure has grown to currently 55 resource centers with more than 6600 CPUs and 750 TBs of disk storage, distributed in 16 participating countries. Inclusion of new resource centers to the existing infrastructure, as well as a support to new user communities, has demanded setup of regionally distributed core services, development of new monitoring and operational tools, and close collaboration of all partner institution in managing such a complex infrastructure. In this paper we give an overview of the development and current status of SEE-GRID regional infrastructure and describe its transition to the NGI-based Grid model in EGI, with the strong SEE regional collaboration.Comment: 22 pages, 12 figures, 4 table

Organizing the U.S. Health Care Delivery System for High Performance

Analyzes the fragmentation of the healthcare delivery system and makes policy recommendations -- including payment reform, regulatory changes, and infrastructure -- for creating mechanisms to coordinate care across providers and settings

Design of a case management model for people with chronic disease (Heart Failure and COPD). Phase I: modeling and identification of the main components of the intervention through their actors: patients and professionals (DELTA-ICE-PRO Study

Background Chronic diseases account for nearly 60% of deaths around the world. The extent of this silent epidemic has not met determined responses in governments, policies or professionals in order to transform old Health Care Systems, configured for acute diseases. There is a large list of research about alternative models for people with chronic conditions, many of them with an advanced practice nurse as a key provider, as case management. But some methodological concerns raise, above all, the design of the intervention (intensity, frequency, components, etc). Methods/Design Objectives: General: To develop the first and second phases (theorization and modeling) for designing a multifaceted case-management intervention in people with chronic conditions (COPD and heart failure) and their caregivers. Specific aims: 1) To identify key events in people living with chronic disease and their relation with the Health Care System, from their point of view. 2) To know the coping mechanisms developed by patients and their caregivers along the story with the disease. 3) To know the information processing and its utilization in their interactions with health care providers. 4) To detect potential unmet needs and the ways deployed by patients and their caregivers to resolve them. 5) To obtain a description from patients and caregivers, about their itineraries along the Health Care System, in terms of continuity, accessibility and comprehensiveness of care. 6) To build up a list of promising case-management interventions in patients with Heart Failure and COPD with this information in order to frame it into theoretical models for its reproducibility and conceptualization. 7) To undergo this list to expert judgment to assess its feasibility and pertinence in the Andalusian Health Care. Design: Qualitative research with two phases: For the first five objectives, a qualitative technique with biographic stories will be developed and, for the remaining objectives, an expert consensus through Delphi technique, on the possible interventions yielded from the first phase. The study will be developed in the provinces of Almería, Málaga and Granada in the Southern Spain, from patients included in the Andalusian Health Care Service database with the diagnosis of COPD or Heart Failure, with the collaboration of case manager nurses and general practitioners for the assessment of their suitability to inclusion criteria. Patients and caregivers will be interviewed in their homes or their Health Centers, with their family or their case manager nurse as mediator. Discussion First of a series of studies intended to design a case-management service for people with heart failure and COPD, in the Andalusian Health Care System, where case management has been implemented since 2002. Accordingly with the steps of a theoretical model for complex interventions, in this study, theorization and intervention modeling phases will be developed.This research was carried out with the support of one research grant, awarded by the Regional Health Ministry of Andalusia (Exp. 0222/2008

Balancing Access to Data And Privacy. A review of the issues and approaches for the future

Access to sensitive micro data should be provided using remote access data enclaves. These enclaves should be built to facilitate the productive, high-quality usage of microdata. In other words, they should support a collaborative environment that facilitates the development and exchange of knowledge about data among data producers and consumers. The experience of the physical and life sciences has shown that it is possible to develop a research community and a knowledge infrastructure around both research questions and the different types of data necessary to answer policy questions. In sum, establishing a virtual organization approach would provided the research community with the ability to move away from individual, or artisan, science, towards the more generally accepted community based approach. Enclave should include a number of features: metadata documentation capacity so that knowledge about data can be shared; capacity to add data so that the data infrastructure can be augmented; communication capacity, such as wikis, blogs and discussion groups so that knowledge about the data can be deepened and incentives for information sharing so that a community of practice can be built. The opportunity to transform micro-data based research through such a organizational infrastructure could potentially be as far-reaching as the changes that have taken place in the biological and astronomical sciences. It is, however, an open research question how such an organization should be established: whether the approach should be centralized or decentralized. Similarly, it is an open research question as to the appropriate metrics of success, and the best incentives to put in place to achieve success.Methodology for Collecting, Estimating, Organizing Microeconomic Data