The evolution of the pathway and its role in improving patient care

Redesign in healthcare has increased the focus on the needs of the patient. The redesign process typically involves a review of current practice using the patient pathway before considering possible improvements. The patient pathway can serve various roles and it may be mapped in different ways using a variety of media. This paper reviews the evolution of the patient pathway comparing the merits of different media. Simple approaches to mapping pathways can be most useful. However, experience in the redesign of Unscheduled Care in NHS Fife suggests that computer based, hierarchical pathway models using stylised icons offer many advantages. Such approaches can increase the effectiveness of pathways in the redesign process, providing both the detail and the system view in an accessible graphical form. This enhanced capability helps staff analyse current practice, and visualise and assess redesign options. In addition, the pathway can fulfil new roles as a training tool and an effective basis for organising knowledge about patient care

Towards the Evaluation of Software Products from an Environmental Sustainability Perspective

Sustainable development implies resource management that simultaneously guarantees the satisfaction of the present and future generations, considering the social, economic, and environmental dimensions. This paper proposes an approach to quantitatively assess software products\u27 sustainability quality based on a library of requirements (i.e., general goals) considered as criteria in a multicriteria evaluation and analysis. To increase the environmental sustainability of software products, we argue that it is fundamental to comparatively evaluate them, identify the ones most in need of change, and quickly adapt existing products effectively and efficiently

Software quality evaluation: a bibliometric analysis and future perspectives

The theme of “Software Quality Evaluation”, and its importance, concerns the standardization of the development processes, in order to guarantee a higher quality of the systems. In this scenario, this theme has gained importance in academic research, due to the emphasis that the theme has increasingly presented to organizations, since they understand that the main objective is to guarantee a final product that satisfies the expectations of the client. In order to verify the scientific scenario in recent years, this work aims to carry out a review of the literature on “Software Quality Evaluation”, based on a bibliometric analysis and review. For this, the method of bibliographic revision with four different phases proposed by Marasco (2008) was used. From the data extracted from the Scopus database, the results of the systematic review and bibliometric analysis were analyzed from the information on publications, citations and approaches of the papers that deal with this subject. As results, the present article showed the academic and practical importance of the studies on “Software Quality Evaluation”. In addition, it is possible to identify gaps in the scientific literature that can be filled by future work in the area, based on the studies developed by specialists

A technique for the evaluation of free and open source e-learning systems

Philosophiae Doctor - PhDEvaluating software is a universal and complex problem. The question is: how should software be selected and adopted, or rather, which of the software packages is the most suitable for a specific environment? Extensive research on the evaluation of software has been done, but only a few researchers have considered evaluation of e-learning systems based on three software quality characteristics (i.e. usability, maintainability and deployability) for implementation in third world countries. In this thesis, it will be considered how to use a mixed research methods for the evaluation of free and open source e-learning systems in a developing country. The scope of this investigation is the evaluation of two free and open source e-learning systems at the Open University of Tanzania using 33 stakeholders (some with more and others with less computer expertise).South Afric