31 research outputs found
Patient Safety and Quality: An Evidence-Based Handbook for Nurses
Compiles peer-reviewed research and literature reviews on issues regarding patient safety and quality of care, ranging from evidence-based practice, patient-centered care, and nurses' working conditions to critical opportunities and tools for improvement
Front-Line Physicians' Satisfaction with Information Systems in Hospitals
Day-to-day operations management in hospital units is difficult due to continuously varying situations, several actors involved and a vast number of information systems in use. The aim of this study was to describe front-line physicians' satisfaction with existing information systems needed to support the day-to-day operations management in hospitals. A cross-sectional survey was used and data chosen with stratified random sampling were collected in nine hospitals. Data were analyzed with descriptive and inferential statistical methods. The response rate was 65 % (n = 111). The physicians reported that information systems support their decision making to some extent, but they do not improve access to information nor are they tailored for physicians. The respondents also reported that they need to use several information systems to support decision making and that they would prefer one information system to access important information. Improved information access would better support physicians' decision making and has the potential to improve the quality of decisions and speed up the decision making process.Peer reviewe
Development and use of methods to estimate chronic disease prevalence in small populations
Introduction
National data on the prevalence of chronic diseases on general practice registers is now available. The aim of this PhD was to develop and validate epidemiological models for the expected prevalence of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), coronary heart disease (CHD), stroke, hypertension, overall cardiovascular disease (CVD) and high CVD risk at general practice and small area level, and to explore the extent of undiagnosed disease, factors associated with it, and its impact on population health.
Methods
Multinomial logistic regression models were fitted to pooled Health Survey for England data to derive odds ratios for disease risk factors. These were applied to general practice and small area level population data, split by age, sex, ethnicity, deprivation, rurality and smoking status, to estimate expected disease prevalence at these levels. Validation was carried out using external data, including population-based epidemiological research and case-finding initiatives. Practice-level undiagnosed disease prevalence i.e. expected minus registered disease prevalence, and hospital admission rates for these conditions, were evaluated as outcome indicators of the quality and supply of primary health care services, using ordinary least squares (OLS) regression, geographically-weighted regression (GWR), and other spatial analytic methods.
Results
Risk factors, odds of disease and expected prevalence were consistent with external data sources. Spatial analysis showed strong evidence of spatial non-stationarity of undiagnosed disease prevalence, with high levels of undiagnosed disease in London and other conurbations, and associations with low supply of primary health care services. Higher hospital admission rates were associated with population deprivation, poorer quality and supply of primary health care services and poorer access to them, and for COPD, with higher levels of undiagnosed disease.
Conclusion
The epidemiologic prevalence models have been implemented in national data sources such as NHS Comparators, the Association of Public Health Observatories website, and a number of national reports. Early experience suggests that they are useful for guiding case-finding at practice level and improving and regulating the quality of primary health care. Comparisons with external data, in particular prevalence of disease detected by general practices, suggest that model predictions are valid.
Practice-level spatial analyses of undiagnosed disease prevalence and hospital admission rates failed to demonstrate superiority of GWR over OLS methods. Disease modellers should be encouraged to collaborate more effectively, and to validate and compare modelling methods using an agreed framework. National leadership is needed to further develop and implement disease models. It is likely that prevalence models will prove to be most useful for identifying undiagnosed diseases with a slow and insidious onset, such as COPD, diabetes and hypertension
Too much, too late? Drug prescribing for older people near the end of life
Background. The burden of drugs prescribed to older persons at the end of life has
recently drawn increasing scrutiny. Growing evidence suggests that patients with lifelimiting diseases and poor prognosis are prescribed drugs that may do more harm than
good or treatments that have little chance of achieving their benefit during the patientsâ
short remaining lifespan. The overall aim of this thesis was to evaluate the quality of drug
prescribing in older adults near the end of life. Except for Study III, all studies are based
on routinely collected administrative and healthcare data with national coverage in
Sweden.
Study I. We found that, throughout their last year of life, older adults (n=511 843) used
an increasing number of prescription drugs. The proportion of older adults exposed to
âĽ10 drugs increased from 30.3% one year before death to 47.2% during the last month
of life. Polypharmacy was fuelled not only by the initiation of symptomatic drugs to
ensure comfort but also by the frequent continuation of long-term preventive treatments
and medicines prescribed for the management of chronic diseases that may otherwise
lead to short-term complications.
Study II. Older adults who died with solid cancer (n=151 201) often continued to receive
preventive drugs until the very end of life. Over the course of the last 12 months of life,
there was little change in the receipt of antihypertensive agents (absolute change -0.3%,
95% CI -0.6 to 0.0), vitamin K antagonists (+1.5%, 95% CI 1.1 to 1.9), antiplatelet agents (-
1.5%, 95% CI -1.8 to -1.2), statins (-4.7%, 95% CI -5.0 to -4.4), bisphosphonates (-0.3%, 95%
CI -0.4 to -0.2), or vitamins (+1.0, 95% CI 0.8 to 1.2). During the last year before
death, median drug costs amounted to 700-213 (IQR, 490) for preventive therapies. We found important
differences between cancer types with regard to the use and costs of preventive drugs,
which can be explained only in part by age and chronic multimorbidity.
Study III. Forty European experts in geriatrics, clinical pharmacology, and palliative
medicine from 10 different countries participated in a Delphi consensus panel to identify
drugs deemed âoften adequateâ, âquestionableâ, or âoften inadequateâ for use in older
patients aged âĽ75 years with an estimated life expectancy of 3 months or less. Drug
classes rated as âoften adequateâ are predominantly indicated for symptom
management and comfort care. Among the drugs and drug classes considered
âquestionableâ for use near the end of life, a vast majority are prescribed for the longterm management of non-life-threatening chronic conditions or for the secondary
prevention of chronic diseases that may otherwise quickly lead to serious clinical
complications. Finally, drugs defined as âoften inadequateâ encompasses mostly drugs
and supplements prescribed for primary prevention or as part of a long-term strategy of
secondary or tertiary prevention.
Study IV. By applying the list mentioned above to a cohort of 58 415 older persons who
died from conditions potentially amenable to palliative care in 2015, we found that 32%
continued and 14% initiated at least one drug considered âoften inadequateâ during their
last three months of life. Excluding older adults who died from acute and potentially
unpredictable fatal events had little if any influence on the results.
Conclusion. Older people are prescribed an increasing number of drugs as they
approach the end of life. A sizeable fraction of these drugs is not directed towards the
relief of distressing symptoms but instead aims at prolonging survival and managing
chronic comorbidities. We have developed a consensus-based set of explicit criteria for
delineating drugs that are âoften adequateâ from those deemed âquestionableâ or âoften
inadequateâ for use in older persons at the end of life. In the absence of high-quality data
from randomised clinical trials and sufficiently robust observational studies, these criteria
can be used not only to provide guidance at the bedside but also to generate comparable
epidemiological evidence across patient groups, care settings, regions, and countries
Managing healthcare transformation towards P5 medicine (Published in Frontiers in Medicine)
Health and social care systems around the world are facing radical organizational, methodological and technological paradigm changes to meet the requirements for improving quality and safety of care as well as efficiency and efficacy of care processes. In this theyâre trying to manage the challenges of ongoing demographic changes towards aging, multi-diseased societies, development of human resources, a health and social services consumerism, medical and biomedical progress, and exploding costs for health-related R&D as well as health services delivery. Furthermore, they intend to achieve sustainability of global health systems by transforming them towards intelligent, adaptive and proactive systems focusing on health and wellness with optimized quality and safety outcomes.
The outcome is a transformed health and wellness ecosystem combining the approaches of translational medicine, 5P medicine (personalized, preventive, predictive, participative precision medicine) and digital health towards ubiquitous personalized health services realized independent of time and location. It considers individual health status, conditions, genetic and genomic dispositions in personal social, occupational, environmental and behavioural context, thus turning health and social care from reactive to proactive. This requires the advancement communication and cooperation among the business actors from different domains (disciplines) with different methodologies, terminologies/ontologies, education, skills and experiences from data level (data sharing) to concept/knowledge level (knowledge sharing). The challenge here is the understanding and the formal as well as consistent representation of the world of sciences and practices, i.e. of multidisciplinary and dynamic systems in variable context, for enabling mapping between the different disciplines, methodologies, perspectives, intentions, languages, etc. Based on a framework for dynamically, use-case-specifically and context aware representing multi-domain ecosystems including their development process, systems, models and artefacts can be consistently represented, harmonized and integrated. The response to that problem is the formal representation of health and social care ecosystems through an system-oriented, architecture-centric, ontology-based and policy-driven model and framework, addressing all domains and development process views contributing to the system and context in question.
Accordingly, this Research Topic would like to address this change towards 5P medicine. Specifically, areas of interest include, but are not limited:
⢠A multidisciplinary approach to the transformation of health and social systems
⢠Success factors for sustainable P5 ecosystems
⢠AI and robotics in transformed health ecosystems
⢠Transformed health ecosystems challenges for security, privacy and trust
⢠Modelling digital health systems
⢠Ethical challenges of personalized digital health
⢠Knowledge representation and management of transformed health ecosystems
Table of Contents:
04 Editorial: Managing healthcare transformation towards P5
medicine
Bernd Blobel and Dipak Kalra
06 Transformation of Health and Social Care SystemsâAn
Interdisciplinary Approach Toward a Foundational
Architecture
Bernd Blobel, Frank Oemig, Pekka Ruotsalainen and Diego M. Lopez
26 Transformed Health EcosystemsâChallenges for Security,
Privacy, and Trust
Pekka Ruotsalainen and Bernd Blobel
36 Success Factors for Scaling Up the Adoption of Digital
Therapeutics Towards the Realization of P5 Medicine
Alexandra Prodan, Lucas Deimel, Johannes Ahlqvist, Strahil Birov,
Rainer Thiel, Meeri Toivanen, Zoi Kolitsi and Dipak Kalra
49 EU-Funded Telemedicine Projects â Assessment of, and
Lessons Learned From, in the Light of the SARS-CoV-2
Pandemic
Laura Paleari, Virginia Malini, Gabriella Paoli, Stefano Scillieri,
Claudia Bighin, Bernd Blobel and Mauro Giacomini
60 A Review of Artificial Intelligence and Robotics in
Transformed Health Ecosystems
Kerstin Denecke and Claude R. Baudoin
73 Modeling digital health systems to foster interoperability
Frank Oemig and Bernd Blobel
89 Challenges and solutions for transforming health ecosystems
in low- and middle-income countries through artificial
intelligence
Diego M. LĂłpez, Carolina Rico-Olarte, Bernd Blobel and Carol Hullin
111 Linguistic and ontological challenges of multiple domains
contributing to transformed health ecosystems
Markus Kreuzthaler, Mathias Brochhausen, Cilia Zayas, Bernd Blobel
and Stefan Schulz
126 The ethical challenges of personalized digital health
Els Maeckelberghe, Kinga Zdunek, Sara Marceglia, Bobbie Farsides
and Michael Rigb
Acute oncology service = Acute palliative service? Early palliative care assessment results from a pilot project in South Wales
Background: The National Chemotherapy Advisory Group report 2009 recommends an acute oncology service (AOS) in every UK hospital with an emergency department. Patients discussed in Acute Oncology Service settings are often very unwell, at the start of their cancer journey, and may have multiple challenging symptoms. Aims: Will earlier palliative care intervention in AOS meetings result in an increase in palliative care involvement? As a comparative baseline we used data from Royal Sussex County Hospital, where an acute admission AOS data collection was carried out: in 53 patients with cancer, palliative care were involved in four cases (7.5%). Methods: As part of this project, our palliative care team started to attend AOS meetings at Velindre Cancer Hospital on a daily basis. After initial embedding, a strategy to collect data was designed and an audit cycle was carried out. Results: Through integration of the palliative care team into Acute Oncology Service meetings, key areas of advance care planning were addressed and discussions with patients were planned. Of 100 patients assessed during the AOS reporting period, 80% were not known to a palliative care team/provider. Of all patients analysed, 28% required no palliative input, 29% were signposted to another palliative care team, 27% received same day face to face palliative care review and 16% required verbal advice only to a generalist team member. Advance care planning discussions in the sample of patients who needed some palliative care input were held within a two week time frame in 61% of cases. Discussion: Significant findings included large population (80%) unknown to palliative care services at AOS entry point, but with high level of unmet need. 72% had palliative care needs. 29% had received their cancer diagnosis within the last month. Conclusion: AOS meetings appear to be a valid entry point for referral to palliative services, despite many AOS patients being at the start of their cancer diagnosis