A Disease Tracking EHR for Ghana

The goal of the project was to develop a disease tracking electronic health record (EHR) system for Ghana in order to improve efficiency within medical facilities and to increase the quality of patient care. There are only a few medical facilities that have implemented EHR systems, and even fewer with immunization and disease tracking. Our proposed system, VermaMS, stores a history of patient visits for every patient diagnosed with malaria, tuberculosis, or meningitis. Users of the application are able to view patient data graphically as well as generate a report that contains information on each patient’s visit. VermaMS is intended to be used in conjunction with the current EHR systems, but it could potentially be developed into a full EHR system of its own in the future

A Model-Based Approach to Comprehensive Risk Management for Medical Devices

The European medical technology industry consists of around 27,000 companies, more than 95% of them small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), with over 675,000 employees [MEDT17]. In the European Union (EU) alone, medical devices constituted by far the biggest part of the medical technology (MedTech) sector with a market of 95 billion euros in annual sales in 2015 [EURO15].The European medical technology industry consists of around 27,000 companies, more than 95% of them small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), with over 675,000 employees [MEDT17]. In the European Union (EU) alone, medical devices constituted by far the biggest part of the medical technology (MedTech) sector with a market of 95 billion euros in annual sales in 2015 [EURO15]

DevOps for Digital Leaders

DevOps; continuous delivery; software lifecycle; concurrent parallel testing; service management; ITIL; GRC; PaaS; containerization; API management; lean principles; technical debt; end-to-end automation; automatio

Knowledge strategies for managers in a networked world

Thesis (S.M.M.O.T.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Sloan School of Management, Management of Technology Program, 2002.This electronic version was submitted by the student author. The certified thesis is available in the Institute Archives and Special Collections.Includes bibliographical references (leaves 116-121).As our world becomes more complex and information-rich, the effort needed to share and create knowledge is increasing greatly. Transformation from Industrial Age to Information Age organizations is not simple. But there are strategies managers can use and emulate, to make their organizations more successful in sharing and creating new knowledge, to achieve better performance. Knowledge loss is a significant issue. Demographics may cause the "first-of-type" implementation pioneers to retire, or events such as those of Fall 2001 may cause people to be no longer available -- or no longer able to reach their knowledge support systems, as seen when anthrax attacks closed Congressional offices for weeks. Strategies can be implemented for the different kinds of knowledge -- explicit knowledge, meta knowledge, and tacit knowledge. Processes can be used to enhance knowledge sharing, extending the number of people who know and reducing the risk of loss. The US Army is a learning organization which has spent the past decade becoming "knowledge centric and network centric." Techniques, processes and knowledge lessons learned are presented, including a case study of the Project Management Office for Bradley Fighting Vehicle Systems, as it transformed its people, organization, and vehicles being developed from Industrial Age to internet-work Information Age systems. Rather than focusing on knowledge management, which has become synonymous with archiving what is already known into digital databases, I am focused on the strategies real-world managers can use for knowledge. The goal is to help the organization achieve better performance by sharing knowledge. Technology can help, when supporting instead of driving the goals. Networking, both in person and virtually, can overcome the isolation of knowledge. Many of my examples tap into the experiences I had or observed in the US Army product development community -- but I believe they are valuable and generalizable to other high- performance organizations. "Hope is not a method" -- knowledge sharing is a better technique.by Lisa M. Shaler-Clark.S.M.M.O.T

DevOps for Digital Leaders

DevOps; continuous delivery; software lifecycle; concurrent parallel testing; service management; ITIL; GRC; PaaS; containerization; API management; lean principles; technical debt; end-to-end automation; automatio

Building an Effective Health Insurance Exchange Website

Offers lessons and resources from Massachusetts about teams and partnerships, vendors, stakeholder input, system requirements, and ongoing improvement to help states plan, build, and implement Web sites for health insurance exchanges

Development and user testing of a wellness data visualization solution

Use of information technology in health and wellness attracts a lot of attention these days from the general public, health care professionals, and the research community. A significant amount of research has been done lately in order to find ways to visualize health and wellness data in a holistic way which is easy to use and understand. The main objective of the thesis was to develop a health and wellness solution for visualizing the health and wellness status of an individual and monitoring his/her progress in the health and wellness coaching. The research focused on three main issues: 1) Devel-oping a Progress data component which allows for monitoring the adherence of clients to tasks and to see their performance, 2) integrating the component with two other com-ponents in the system to create a Health and wellness overview solution, and 3) testing and evaluation of the component and the solution to assess usability issues and to gather user feedback. The research followed a user-centered approach by focusing on the users and tasks from the beginning of the design process. This approach also included iterative design, with cycles of design, test, measure, and redesign. This approach was chosen to reach a high level of usability and user satisfaction by obtaining direct and indirect user feedback and requirements throughout the design process. After implementation, testing and evaluations were conducted in two phases, namely after the implementation of the Progress data component, and after the integration of the component with the rest of the system. The evaluations were conducted with two different types of potential users: general users, and experts in usability issues. Many different techniques and methods were used in the evaluation studies. These included four standardized usability questionnaires, and the comparison of the data between them, in order to obtain high levels of reliability of the data. The results showed a high level of satisfaction with all the metrics of usability of the system, with average responses between 5.66 and 6.60 in the 7-point Likert scale. With regard to overall user satisfaction, the results were equally positive in all four question-naires, with scores between 6.02 and 6.46 in the Likert scale. Some issues of interaction between the different components of the system still need further development, and the design should be evaluated on and, if need be, redesigned for, devices with different screen sizes. The results indicate that successful visualization can help people understand better their holistic health and wellness data

An Expert System for Rating Vulnerabilities

Over the past few years, there has been a worrying trend of increment in number of web application intrusions. Based on reports released by reliable sources, these incidents are due to the lack of experts in performing accurate risk assessment to mitigate the risk while performing web security testing. Risk assessment is the core process in providing appropriate recommendations when dealing with vulnerabilities discovered in a web application. Therefore this research paper will be highlighting the problem of insufficient experts to guide the less experienced information security analyst in conducting effective risk assessment. The objective of this research will be to design an expert system to aid the less experienced system analyst in conducting accurate risk assessment during the absence of experts. The expert system will cover all risk rating of vulnerabilities included in the OWASP Top 10 2013, and the target user will only be the less experienced information system analyst. The methodology used in the research would be based on the expert system development life cycle model. The main activity conducted is the construction of knowledge base of the proposed expert system. Based on the results of collected knowledge and information from the internet as well as interviewing experts, the knowledge developer will construct a decision tree which aids in the development of the expert system in later phase of the research

The Determinants of Customer Perceptions in a Dynamic Business Environment: An Exploratory Analysis of the ASP Business Model

Outsourcing attracted much attention in 1989 when Kodak outsourced its data center operation to IBM (International Business Machines Corp.). Nowadays, this strategy has become more popular. At the beginning of this century, the ASP (Application Service Provider) model was considered one of the typical solutions of Internet-based IT (Information Technology) outsourcing. Although this model has been transformed and renamed (e.g. SaaS - Software as a Service), the principle concept of providing IT service through the Internet or wide area network is still there. This study attempts to explore the determinants of customer perception of Internet-based IT outsourcing by obtaining a comprehensive understanding of the ASP model. The research dimensions not only include factors affecting users' perception of service quality but also ASP business position (i.e. the firm origin of ASP and its provider type) and services utilized by the customers. Through the study of firm history, two important theoretical themes of this research - path-dependence and Ansoff's product/ market growth matrix - are taken account of in exploring the influence of the determinants. Web-based questionnaire survey research is conducted together with a documentation study to collect data. Targeting the customers of the top 50 ASPs selected by ASPnews.com during the period 2001-2004, the researcher contacted 597 potential respondents, and 196 responses were returned. The valid sample consisted of 175 responses, and 124 of them not only provided full information for satisfaction evaluation but also the information for tracking their ASP vendors' business position. The GLM (General Linear Model) and the Pearson correlation coefficient were the major statistical approaches used to evaluate the survey data for developing a structural model. The research findings indicated that the factors associated with service competitiveness, such as capability and performance, reliability and trustworthiness, affordability, integration and customization, have positive effects on customer perceived satisfaction; whereas lock-in has a negative effect. More specifically, the origin of the ASP firm has a direct effect on capacity and performance, and also directly influences the use of IT adoption services. Based on this finding, a descriptive analysis and qualitative research shows that two mechanisms for path-dependence - existing expertise and perceived expertise - can affect the satisfaction level of capacity and performance of ASP services. On the other hand, provider type has a direct effect on affordability and also directly influences the use of facility supporting services. On this basis, another two mechanisms for path-dependence - transaction cost and standardization - can indirectly impact customer's perception of this business model via affordability. In addition to those major findings, some other determinants (e.g. software applications, brand of applications, and intensity of service used) were also identified in this study. The study result can be used for theoretical understanding about the determinants of ASP customer's perception. It not only indicates a new perspective to enhance the current body of research on this topic, but can also be more broadly applied to any fast-growth firm, rapid-change business, or technology intensive industry. Acknowledgements I would like to sincerely thank the following people for their contribution to this research project. Dr. Scott Koslow, my chief supervisor, for his continued encouragement, patience and guidance to ensure the completion of this project. His speciality in statistics has provided appropriate and valuable guidance in the data analysis for my research. Dr. Steven Lim, my second supervisor, for his advice, coherence, and support over the years. I also appreciate his constructive comments on my drafts and the shaping of my research. Dr. Bob McQueen and Dr. Jim Corner, for their assistance and advice in the early stages of my study. My parents, Yu-Ho and Lee-Chiung Liang, and my brother Ken, my sisters Annie, Eva, and Nancy, my brothers-in-law, J.C. and Chen, and Alice, my sister-in-law, for their emotional support throughout the length of my study. I also thank Bessie, my best friend for her assistance in data collection and her loving support, as well as Ted, Kevin, Mark, Frank, and Shirley, my study mates for their encouragement and friendship. Special thanks goes to Dr. Kuang-Ya Wang, the principal of Yu Da High School of Commerce and Home Economics, Taiwan, and also to the staff over there for their concern and assistance in data collection. Most importantly, my heartfelt appreciation goes to Warren, my husband. I am deeply grateful to him for his understanding, patience, and practical help. Without his enduring support I could not have done this study. Finally, my thanks and gratitude goes to those people who patiently answered my survey questionnaire as their kind assistance made it possible to complete this research