The Importance Of Health Insurance Policy On Purchase Intention / Continuance – An Empirical Study In Malaysia

Penduduk seluruh dunia menyedari kepentingan polisi insurans kesihatan untuk menangani isu yang tidak diduga kepastiannya pada masa ini. People all of over the world realized the importance of health insurance policy as the unforeseen uncertainties has become the order of the day

How Resilient Are Our Societies? Analyses, Models, and Preliminary Results

Traditional social organizations such as those for the management of healthcare and civil defence are the result of designs and realizations that matched well with an operational context considerably different from the one we are experiencing today: A simpler world, characterized by a greater amount of resources to match less users producing lower peaks of requests. The new context reveals all the fragility of our societies: unmanageability is just around the corner unless we do not complement the "old recipes" with smarter forms of social organization. Here we analyze this problem and propose a refinement to our fractal social organizations as a model for resilient cyber-physical societies. Evidence to our claims is provided by simulating our model in terms of multi-agent systems.Comment: Paper submitted for publication in the Proc. of SERENE 2015 (http://serene.disim.univaq.it/2015/

EXPOSURE AND HANDLING PRACTICES OF HEALTHCARE PROFESSIONALS FOR CYTOTOXIC DRUGS IN THE WORKPLACE ENVIRONMENT

Introduction: Occupational exposure to cytotoxic drugs is associated with various unfavorable health outcomes. There is currently no safe level for occupational exposure to cytotoxic agents. Healthcare workers’ adherence to cytotoxics control measures is of primary importance to minimize the risk from exposure to these agents. Aims: To develop a protocol for a systematic review and meta-analysis on environmental assessment of cytotoxic drugs in healthcare settings and conduct an environmental assessment study of cytotoxic drugs in two Oncology centers of Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates (UAE). In addition to evaluate pharmacists’ and nurses’ Knowledge, Attitudes, and Practices (KAP) towards handling of cytotoxic drugs. Method: This research project comprised of three studies. The first study developed a protocol on environmental assessment of cytotoxic drugs in healthcare settings. The protocol was developed in line with PRISMA-P guidelines. The second study evaluated workplace contamination with 10 cytotoxic drugs by collecting 79 surface wipe samples from preparation and administration areas of two Abu Dhabi Oncology centers. The third study was a cross-sectional survey using an online self-administrated questionnaire to assess pharmacists’ and nurses’ KAP regarding the handling of cytotoxic drugs. Results: In the first study, the protocol was registered (ID CRD42020162780) on The International Prospective Register of Systematic Reviews (PROSPERO). In the second study, a total of 79 surface samples were analyzed. Of these, 20 samples (25%) were positive for cytotoxic drug residues. Moreover, 10 samples (13%) indicated contamination by more than one cytotoxic drug, mainly in the oncology pharmacy department in both hospitals. The levels of contamination in the positive samples ranged from 0.003 to 50 ng/cm2. In the third study, 113 oncology healthcare professionals participated in the survey (23 Male and 90 Female). Most of them were aware of the potential hazards associated with handling of cytotoxic medications. The mean score of the participants’ knowledge was 74.04 out of 100. The majority of the participants reported high adherence levels to the use of personal protective equipment such as gloves, protective gown, and mask (98.14%, 97.22%, and 96.29%), respectively, while handling these agents. All the participants (100%) had received training on the safe handling of cytotoxic drugs during the past year. Significant contributions: The findings of this research provide important baseline data about exposure and handling practices of healthcare professionals for cytotoxic drugs in the workplace environment. The findings may be used to develop programs about cytotoxic drugs handling that will help to minimize the risk of these agents. The results also point out that it is vital to healthcare facilities to assess environmental contamination with cytotoxics. Such initiatives will contribute to raise both knowledge and practices of healthcare professionals regarding the handling of cytotoxic drugs. Gap filled: The environmental assessment study is the first study in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region, and in UAE in particular, that evaluated the potential environmental contamination with ten cytotoxic drugs in preparation and administration areas. Furthermore, the KAP study is also the first in the UAE to assess oncology healthcare professionals’ KAP towards handling of cytotoxic drugs

Managing healthcare workflows in a multi-agent system environment

Whilst Multi-Agent System (MAS) architectures appear to offer a more flexible model for designers and developers of complex, collaborative information systems, implementing real-world business processes that can be delegated to autonomous agents is still a relatively difficult task. Although a range of agent tools and toolkits exist, there still remains the need to move the creation of models nearer to code generation, in order that the development path be more rigorous and repeatable. In particular, it is essential that complex organisational process workflows are captured and expressed in a way that MAS can successfully interpret. Using a complex social care system as an exemplar, we describe a technique whereby a business process is captured, expressed, verified and specified in a suitable format for a healthcare MAS.</p

CoachAI: A Conversational Agent Assisted Health Coaching Platform

Poor lifestyle represents a health risk factor and is the leading cause of morbidity and chronic conditions. The impact of poor lifestyle can be significantly altered by individual behavior change. Although the current shift in healthcare towards a long lasting modifiable behavior, however, with increasing caregiver workload and individuals' continuous needs of care, there is a need to ease caregiver's work while ensuring continuous interaction with users. This paper describes the design and validation of CoachAI, a conversational agent assisted health coaching system to support health intervention delivery to individuals and groups. CoachAI instantiates a text based healthcare chatbot system that bridges the remote human coach and the users. This research provides three main contributions to the preventive healthcare and healthy lifestyle promotion: (1) it presents the conversational agent to aid the caregiver; (2) it aims to decrease caregiver's workload and enhance care given to users, by handling (automating) repetitive caregiver tasks; and (3) it presents a domain independent mobile health conversational agent for health intervention delivery. We will discuss our approach and analyze the results of a one month validation study on physical activity, healthy diet and stress management

Clinical encounter and the logic of relationality : Reconfiguring bodies and subjectivities in clinical relations

Acknowledgements I would like to thank all the patients and staff for their collaboration in the study and to acknowledge the other members of the team: James N’Dow and Sara MacLennan for their helpful guidance. I am grateful to Zoë Skea and Vikki Entwistle for the early discussions of the paper, to Natasha Mauthner and Lorna McKee for their insightful comments to various drafts, and to two anonymous reviewers for their thoughtful suggestions, which helped to clarify its argument. Funding The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This research was supported by a grant from the Big Lottery Fund. The views expressed here are the author’s and do not necessarily reflect those of the funding bodies or any other organisation.Peer reviewedPostprin

CAMMD: Context Aware Mobile Medical Devices

Telemedicine applications on a medical practitioners mobile device should be context-aware. This can vastly improve the effectiveness of mobile applications and is a step towards realising the vision of a ubiquitous telemedicine environment. The nomadic nature of a medical practitioner emphasises location, activity and time as key context-aware elements. An intelligent middleware is needed to effectively interpret and exploit these contextual elements. This paper proposes an agent-based architectural solution called Context-Aware Mobile Medical Devices (CAMMD). This framework can proactively communicate patient records to a portable device based upon the active context of its medical practitioner. An expert system is utilised to cross-reference the context-aware data of location and time against a practitioners work schedule. This proactive distribution of medical data enhances the usability and portability of mobile medical devices. The proposed methodology alleviates constraints on memory storage and enhances user interaction with the handheld device. The framework also improves utilisation of network bandwidth resources. An experimental prototype is presented highlighting the potential of this approach