Guidelines for percutaneous transluminal coronary angioplasty. A report of the American Heart Association/American College of Cardiology Task Force on Assessment of Diagnostic and Therapeutic Cardiovascular Procedures (Committee on Percutaneous Transluminal Coronary Angioplasty)

"The American College of Cardiology/American Heart Association Task Force on Assessment of Diagnostic and Therapeutic Cardiovascular Procedures was formed to gather information and make recommendations about appropriate use of technology in the diagnosis and treatment of patients with cardiovascular disease. Coronary angioplasty is one such important technique. We are currently witnessing an extraordinary expansion of the use of coronary angioplasty as an alternative means of achieving myocardial revascularization. An estimated 300 000 angioplasty procedures were performed in the United States in 1990, a more than tenfold increase over the past decade.1 Such growth is attributable not only to demonstrated clinical benefit but also to continuing technical advances that have led to improved techniques and higher success rates over time. There was some concomitant broadening of the indications for both coronary angiography and angioplasty, which led the task force to promulgate guidelines for coronary angiography in 19872 and guidelines for percutaneous transluminal coronary angioplasty (PTCA) in 1988.3 In view of the continuing advances and expanding role of interventional cardiology in clinical practice today, it was recommended that this committee review current indications and procedures governing the performance of angioplasty in the United States and determine whether any alterations in the previously published guidelines are warranted. Such a review was anticipated and recommended in the original committee report.3 This document presents the summary opinion of the reconvened committee with its newly constituted membership.

Open Access Web Resources for Library Continuing Education and Training

Continuing education and training are essential for a vital and productive organization and for employee adaptability and job satisfaction. Libraries of all types are organizations that value learning. Training and development for library employees is expensive, and can be out of reach for smaller institutions, or libraries that are not well-funded. Regardless of funding, libraries of all types can benefit from the wide variety of training and continuing education opportunities available on the Web as open access resources. These include documentation, journal articles, reports and white papers, online courses, videos, podcasts, and so on, from many different reliable sources. This chapter surveys major sources and types of open access online learning, and evaluates their usefulness for library employees

Aligning IT/IS with Business Strategy Re-visited: a view from Complex Adaptive Systems

This paper explores the co-relational process activities of information technology and systems (IT/IS) and business strategy alignment. The notion of “process” as being strategy and strategic alignment has been observed but not examined. Organizations are both complex and adaptive, and these attributes create significant challenges for managers when assessing strategic requirements. A need exists to further understand alignment as a process and embrace this concept when aligning business IT/IS with the strategic goals of the organisation. This highlights an important distinction of “process” that recasts the nature of congruence and reassesses the appropriateness and usefulness of current practice. The authors propose the use of principles underpinning complex adaptive systems as a way to re-orientate IT/IS alignment in a meaningful and more appropriate manner. The context for the study is the UK Health Service, and informed by a case analysis of 26 senior members from a Scottish Health Board