Molten Salt Thermal Energy Storage Systems

The feasibility of storing thermal energy at temperatures of 450 C to 535 C in the form of latent heat of fusion was examined for over 30 inorganic salts and salt mixtures. Alkali carbonate mixtures were chosen as phase-change storage materials in this temperature range because of their relatively high storage capacity and thermal conductivity, moderate cost, low volumetric expansion upon melting, low corrosivity, and good chemical stability. Means of improving heat conduction through the solid salt were explored

A multinational cross-sectional survey of the management of patient medication adherence by European healthcare professionals

Objectives To examine which interventions healthcare professionals use to support patients with taking medicines and their perceptions about the effectiveness of those actions. Design Cross-sectional multinational study. Setting Online survey in Austria, Belgium, England, France, Germany, Hungary, The Netherlands, Poland, Portugal and Switzerland. Participants A total of 3196 healthcare professionals comprising doctors (855), nurses (1047) and pharmacists (1294) currently registered and practising in primary care and community settings. Main outcome measures Primary outcome: Responses to the question ‘I ask patients if they have missed any doses of their medication’ for each profession and in each country. Secondary outcome: Responses to 50 items concerning healthcare professional behaviour to support patients with medication-taking for each profession and in each country. Results Approximately half of the healthcare professionals in the survey ask patients with long-term conditions whether they have missed any doses of their medication on a regular basis. Pharmacists persistently report that they intervene less than the other two professions to support patients with medicines. No country effects were found for the primary outcome. Conclusions Healthcare professionals in Europe are limited in the extent to which they intervene to assist patients having long-term conditions with medication adherence. This represents a missed opportunity to support people with prescribed treatment. These conclusions are based on the largest international survey to date of healthcare professionals’ management of medication adherence

A Cross-Sectional Survey on Medication Management Practices for Noncommunicable Diseases in Europe During the Second Wave of the COVID-19 Pandemic

Maintaining healthcare for noncommunicable diseases (NCDs) is particularly important during the COVID-19 pandemic; however, diversion of resources to acute care, and physical distancing restrictions markedly affected management of NCDs. We aimed to assess the medication management practices in place for NCDs during the second wave of the COVID-19 pandemic across European countries. In December 2020, the European Network to Advance Best practices & technoLogy on medication adherencE (ENABLE) conducted a cross-sectional, web-based survey in 38 European and one non-European countries. Besides descriptive statistics of responses, nonparametric tests and generalized linear models were used to evaluate the impact on available NCD services of the number of COVID-19 cases and deaths per 100,000 inhabitants, and gross domestic product (GDP) per capita. Fifty-three collaborators from 39 countries completed the survey. In 35 (90%) countries face-to-face primary-care, and out-patient consultations were reduced during the COVID-19 pandemic. The mean ± SD number of available forms of teleconsultation services in the public healthcare system was 3 ± 1.3. Electronic prescriptions were available in 36 (92%) countries. Online ordering and home delivery of prescription medication (avoiding pharmacy visits) were available in 18 (46%) and 26 (67%) countries, respectively. In 20 (51%) countries our respondents were unaware of any national guidelines regarding maintaining medication availability for NCDs, nor advice for patients on how to ensure access to medication and adherence during the pandemic. Our results point to an urgent need for a paradigm shift in NCD-related healthcare services to assure the maintenance of chronic pharmacological treatments during COVID-19 outbreaks, as well as possible future disasters

New event detection and topic tracking in turkish

Topic detection and tracking (TDT) applications aim to organize the temporally ordered stories of a news stream according to the events. Two major problems in TDT are new event detection (NED) and topic tracking (TT). These problems focus on finding the first stories of new events and identifying all subsequent stories on a certain topic defined by a small number of sample stories. In this work, we introduce the first large-scale TDT test collection for Turkish, and investigate the NED and TT problems in this language. We present our test-collection-construction approach, which is inspired by the TDT research initiative. We show that in TDT for Turkish with some similarity measures, a simple word truncation stemming method can compete with a lemmatizer-based stemming approach. Our findings show that contrary to our earlier observations on Turkish information retrieval, in NED word stopping has an impact on effectiveness. We demonstrate that the confidence scores of two different similarity measures can be combined in a straightforward manner for higher effectiveness. The influence of several similarity measures on effectiveness also is investigated. We show that it is possible to deploy TT applications in Turkish that can be used in operational settings. © 2010 ASIS&T

Bilkent news portal: A personalizaba system with new event detection and tracking capabilities

[No abstract available

Adherence to chronic medication in older populations: application of a common protocol among three European cohorts

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to evaluate and compare medication adherence to chronic therapies in older populations across different regions in Europe. Methods: This explorative study applied a harmonized method of data extraction and analysis from pharmacy claims databases of three European countries to compare medication adherence at a cross-country level. Data were obtained for the period between January 1, 2010, and December 31, 2011. Patients (aged >= 65 years) who newly initiated to oral antidiabetics, antihyperlipidemics, or antiosteoporotics were identified and followed for over a 12-month period. Main outcome measures were medication adherence (medication possession ratio, [MPR]; implementation) and persistence on index treatment. All country-specific data sets were prepared by employing a common data input model. Outcome measures were calculated for each country and pooled using random effect models. Results: In total, 39, 186 new users were analyzed. In pooled data from the three countries, suboptimal implementation (MPR <80%) was 52.45% (95% CI: 33.43-70.79) for antihyperlipidemics, 61.35% (95% CI: 52.83-69.22) for antiosteoporotics, and 30.33% (95% CI: 25.53-35.60) for oral antidiabetics. Similarly, rates of non-persistence (discontinuation) were 55.63% (95% CI: 35.24-74.29) for antihyperlipidemics, 60.24% (95% CI: 45.35-73.46) for antiosteoporotics, and 46.80% (95% CI: 36.40-57.4) for oral antidiabetics. Conclusion: Medication adherence was suboptimal with >50% of older people non-adherent to antihyperlipidemics and antiosteoporotics in the three European cohorts. However, the degree of variability in adherence rates among the three countries was high. A harmonized method of data extraction and analysis across health-related database in Europe is useful to compare medication-taking behavior at a cross-country level

“My patients are better than yours”: optimistic bias about patients’ medication adherence by European health care professionals

Objectives: The objectives of this study were to determine the perceptions of European physicians, nurses, and pharmacists about the extent of nonadherence by patients in their country relative to their perception of nonadherence by their own patients, and to investigate the occurrence of optimistic bias about medication adherence. The study explored a key cognitive bias for prevalence and likelihood estimates in the context of health care professionals’ beliefs about patients’ use of medicines. Methods: A cross-sectional online survey of 3,196 physicians (855), nurses (1,294), and pharmacists (1,047) in ten European countries (Austria, Belgium, England, France, Germany, Hungary, the Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, and Switzerland) was used. Results: Participants differed in their perceptions of the prevalence of medication adherence initiation, implementation, and persistence present in their own patients with a chronic illness in comparison to patients with a chronic illness in general. Health care professionals demonstrated optimistic bias for initiation and persistence with medicine taking, perceiving their own patients to be more likely to initiate and persist with treatment than other patients, but reported significantly lower prevalence of medication adherence levels for their own patients than for patients in general. This finding is discussed in terms of motivational and cognitive factors that may foster optimistic bias by health care professionals about their patients, including heightened knowledge of, and positive beliefs about, their own professional competence and service delivery relative to care and treatment provided elsewhere. Conclusion: Health care professionals in Europe demonstrated significant differences in their perceptions of medication adherence prevalence by their own patients in comparison to patients in general. Some evidence of optimistic bias by health care professionals about their patients’ behavior is observed. Further social cognitive theory-based research of health care professional beliefs about medication adherence is warranted to enable theory-based practitioner-focused interventions to be tested and implemented

GATEKEEPER’s Strategy for the Multinational Large-Scale Piloting of an eHealth Platform: Tutorial on How to Identify Relevant Settings and Use Cases

Background: The World Health Organization’s strategy toward healthy aging fosters person-centered integrated care sustained by eHealth systems. However, there is a need for standardized frameworks or platforms accommodating and interconnecting multiple of these systems while ensuring secure, relevant, fair, trust-based data sharing and use. The H2020 project GATEKEEPER aims to implement and test an open-source, European, standard-based, interoperable, and secure framework serving broad populations of aging citizens with heterogeneous health needs. Objective: We aim to describe the rationale for the selection of an optimal group of settings for the multinational large-scale piloting of the GATEKEEPER platform. Methods: The selection of implementation sites and reference use cases (RUCs) was based on the adoption of a double stratification pyramid reflecting the overall health of target populations and the intensity of proposed interventions; the identification of a principles guiding implementation site selection; and the elaboration of guidelines for RUC selection, ensuring clinical relevance and scientific excellence while covering the whole spectrum of citizen complexities and intervention intensities. Results: Seven European countries were selected, covering Europe’s geographical and socioeconomic heterogeneity: Cyprus, Germany, Greece, Italy, Poland, Spain, and the United Kingdom. These were complemented by the following 3 Asian pilots: Hong Kong, Singapore, and Taiwan. Implementation sites consisted of local ecosystems, including health care organizations and partners from industry, civil society, academia, and government, prioritizing the highly rated European Innovation Partnership on Active and Healthy Aging reference sites. RUCs covered the whole spectrum of chronic diseases, citizen complexities, and intervention intensities while privileging clinical relevance and scientific rigor. These included lifestyle-related early detection and interventions, using artificial intelligence–based digital coaches to promote healthy lifestyle and delay the onset or worsening of chronic diseases in healthy citizens; chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and heart failure decompensations management, proposing integrated care management based on advanced wearable monitoring and machine learning (ML) to predict decompensations; management of glycemic status in diabetes mellitus, based on beat to beat monitoring and short-term ML-based prediction of glycemic dynamics; treatment decision support systems for Parkinson disease, continuously monitoring motor and nonmotor complications to trigger enhanced treatment strategies; primary and secondary stroke prevention, using a coaching app and educational simulations with virtual and augmented reality; management of multimorbid older patients or patients with cancer, exploring novel chronic care models based on digital coaching, and advanced monitoring and ML; high blood pressure management, with ML-based predictions based on different intensities of monitoring through self-managed apps; and COVID-19 management, with integrated management tools limiting physical contact among actors. Conclusions: This paper provides a methodology for selecting adequate settings for the large-scale piloting of eHealth frameworks and exemplifies with the decisions taken in GATEKEEPER the current views of the WHO and European Commission while moving forward toward a European Data Space