Criteri di valutazione delle banche dati bibliografiche elettroniche

Introduction: the need for valid and relevant information in clinical healthcare settings raises the problem of how to choose the best biomedical databases to subscribe to. Replicable standard criteria should be defined and should be easy to use and inexpensive. Health technology: electronic databases are useful tools to provide health professionals with good information regarding patients’ care, especially those resources that help support clinical decisions, and that are able to quickly identify documents pertinent to specific health problems. Material and method: the University Hospital “Santa Maria della Misericordia” di Udine has developed an evaluation tool to address the proliferation of proposals available on the market and evaluate potential costs and benefits of individual resources. This instrument is the result of the biomedical documentation service’s experience in the last several years. It consists of 23 questions about the quality of the information and technical-economic aspects of the database in question. The questionnaire’s answers are open or require a "yes" or "no". Results: the application of the instrument to a database results in an overview of the characteristics of each resource and the capacity to compare it with similar databases. Conclusion: the proposed evaluation method offers a quick, objective analysis of possible new purchases and also an indication to what tools are available to clinicians to find the desired information. This approach is part of the methodology of Health Technology Assessment (HTA) and draws attention to the strengths and weaknesses in bibliographic databases, especially in those that are used as clinical decision support system

Avoidable blindness and value based healthcare: More value with a population approach

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COPD management as a model for all chronic respiratory conditions : report of the 4th Consensus Conference in Respiratory Medicine

Background: Non-communicable diseases (NCDs) kill 40 million people each year. The management of chronic respiratory NCDs such as chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) is particularly critical in Italy, where they are widespread and represent a heavy burden on healthcare resources. It is thus important to redefine the role and responsibility of respiratory specialists and their scientific societies, together with that of the whole healthcare system, in order to create a sustainable management of COPD, which could become a model for other chronic respiratory conditions. Methods: These issues were divided into four main topics (Training, Organization, Responsibilities, and Sustainability) and discussed at a Consensus Conference promoted by the Research Center of the Italian Respiratory Society held in Rome, Italy, 3-4 November 2016. Results and conclusions: Regarding training, important inadequacies emerged regarding specialist training - both the duration of practical training courses and teaching about chronic diseases like COPD. A better integration between university and teaching hospitals would improve the quality of specialization. A better organizational integration between hospital and specialists/general practitioners (GPs) in the local community is essential to improve the diagnostic and therapeutic pathways for chronic respiratory patients. Improving the care pathways is the joint responsibility of respiratory specialists, GPs, patients and their caregivers, and the healthcare system. The sustainability of the entire system depends on a better organization of the diagnostic-therapeutic pathways, in which also other stakeholders such as pharmacists and pharmaceutical companies can play an important role

Behaviour of an instrumented reinforced embankment.

none2The paper deals with the case of an overpass, composed of two reinforced earth embankment, linked by a three-span bridge. One of them have been instrumented with electric strain gauges. The Authors present a comparison between experimental and theoretical values of the tensile tension on three characteristic reinforcing elements.mixedMarco Favaretti; Alberto MazzucatoFavaretti, Marco; Alberto, Mazzucat

Prove geotecniche di laboratorio

La conoscenza delle metodologie di esecuzione delle prove di laboratorio costituisce uno dei presupposti per l'analisi critica dei risultati e per la valutazione del significato che può essere attribuito ai parametri che con esse si ottengono. Nel libro sono presentate per capitoli, le procedure che vengosno seguite nelle prove di classificazion, di permeabilità, di compressibilità e di resistenza.. Vengono illustrati, nei vari casi, le apparecchiature e le metodologie usate per la determinazione dei vari parametri, corredate da esempi di calcolo che rendono più comprensibile ed esauriente la trattazione