Health Information Technology in the United States, 2008

Provides updated survey data on health information technology (HIT) and electronic health records adoption, with a focus on providers serving vulnerable populations. Examines assessments of HIT's effect on the cost and quality of care and emerging issues

Governing Privacy in Knowledge Commons

Scholars from various disciplines explore privacy governance using the Governing Knowledge Commons framework. Case studies drawn from contexts such as academia, social media, mental health, and IoT provide insights into how privacy shapes community knowledge production. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core

Pharmacy Practice and Administration

The scope of the Special Issue is research and reviews on evaluations of current practice, innovations in medication management, developments in therapeutics, and pharmaceutical science research that informs and improves practice and administration, as well as the social and administrative pharmacy. We will mainly feature original research, reviews, short reports, and clinical studies, but also case reports, descriptive/how-to, and commentary submissions for consideration

Impact of Providing Patients with Internet Guidance on Clinical Decision-Making and Health Care Outcomes

The majority of Australians who underwent third molar extractions (TME) over a 12-month period received multiple TME with no impact upon their short-term self-rated oral health—a finding from our analysis to the Australia’s 2013 National Dental Telephone Interview Survey. The number of TME was associated with being dentally insured suggesting a possible over-management. Additionally, our finding questioned the use of age as a justification for prophylactic TME. Sine evidence does not support the prophylactic TME and those patients are not adequately informed, emailing patients a pre-consultation educational resources might be beneficial. A randomized control trial (RCT) was conducted to identify whether this intervention could improve TME knowledge and consequently participation in shared decision-making (SDM), dental anxiety and health outcomes. High quality resources were provided as a RCT intervention after conducting a quality and readability assessment for TME online resources using criteria and tools developed for this purpose. The observed variability in TME information quality across websites might question the patients’ ability to get high quality information since our participants were unable to recognize online information quality seals. The majority of our participants were internet-ready with no impact upon their TME knowledge. The internet-ready phenomenon was explained by patients’ preference for an active decisional control. Although our RCT participants were community dental patients seeking public sector treatment, they preferred participation in decision-making. Being a female patient and/or having higher education was associated with an active decisional control preference. This might improve clinicians’ sensitivity to patients’ decisional control role. Preference for involvement in decision-making was associated with a better oral health-related quality of life (QoL) suggesting the benefit for enhancing patients’ involvement in SDM. The researcher explored and modeled how third molars (TMs) experience might impact upon QoL and how QoL domains interact using a qualitative real-time twitter data. This approach showed that the available QoL measures have conceptual limitations in capturing these impacts with wide instrument to instrument variation. QoL domains identified from the Twitter study might be used to develop a new QoL measure for TMs. Although the researcher found that patients’ TMs knowledge was associated with SDM, the intervention provided did not improve patients’ knowledge and therefore it did not improve SDM and consultation outcomes. The lack of efficacy of the intervention provided might be attributed to the wide prevalence of low educational attainment that might limit information uptake. More research is needed to develop information resources for low literacy patients. Our intervention did not increase dental anxiety however, both groups reported high levels of dental anxiety which needs clinicians’ attention. This research contributes to clinical practice by improving patient-clinician communication and TME decision-making. It contributes to patient education theory by revealing gaps in online information quality and information seeking behavior. It contributes to the field of health service quality by revealing the association between involvement in SDM and oral health-related QoL. Arriving at these findings was enabled by using different study designs and mixed research methods. This research suggested several future research opportunities.Thesis (Ph.D.) -- University of Adelaide, Adelaide Dental School, 201

Proceedings of USM-AUT International Conference 2012 Sustainable Economic Development: Policies and Strategies

This proceedings includes papers presented at the USM-AUT International Conference (UAIC 2012) carrying the theme “Sustainable Economic Development: Policies and Strategies”, held on 17-18 November 2012 at Bayview Beach Resort Penang Malaysia. This conference is jointly organized by the School of Social Sciences, Universiti Sains Malaysia (USM), Malaysia, and Faculty of Business and Law, Auckland University of Technology (AUT), New Zealand. We received a total of 167 papers from various institutions and organizations around the world where 82 papers were accepted for inclusion in this proceedings. The proceedings is compiled according to the three sub themes of the conference. It covers both theoretical and empirical works from the scholars globally. It is hoped that the collection of these conference papers will become a valuable reference to the conference participants, researchers, scholars, students, businesses and policy makers. The proceedings will be submitted to Thomson ISI for indexing