Health Information Managers and the future needs of e-health

There are only a handful of tertiary education institutes in Australia that produce Health Information Managers (HIMs), despite the high demand for qualified health information management professionals in the healthcare industry. The high demand in the industry has not been converted into student numbers in tertiary education courses, forcing some institutes to cease offering these courses (McDonald, 2016a). In an era where we are surrounded by technologies and systems that deal with healthcare data, it is puzzling why students are not attracted to health information management or health informatics courses. When I put this question to an open forum at the recent Health Information Management Association of Australia (HIMAA) conference, there were very interesting responses. Some indicated that this profession is ‘not sexy’ and it is rather ‘boring’. The views of some senior academics were that universities should concentrate on converting people already with clinical expertise, such as nurses, into HIMs through postgraduate and research programs, rather than attempting to create HIMs at the undergraduate level. Others had pragmatic views about how courses should be offered in offline mode to attract more students. All of these are valid arguments. On this premise, this article explores skills needed by new-age HIMs and how tertiary education sectors could embrace the new wave of change

Individual grading in groups : a Capstone Project practice

The ICT industry requires professionals with heterogeneous skills such as technical expertise, business management capabilities, innovative thinking and artistic creativity to work together in order to solve complex problems. To meet this industry demand, Western Sydney University (WSU) in Australia has a final-year capstone program aimed at training students with a range of skills to work together, in a software development project, that would enhance their employability. One of the challenges in this program is awarding a fair grade, that accurately reflects each individual student’s potential. As a solution, WSU has developed a System for Individual Grading in Capstone Projects (SIG-CP). SIG-CP calculates individual marks in a group setting, utilizing: peer, supervisor/mentor, client/sponsor and an academic-panel feedback factors. The approach assesses both the product and process aspect of the capstone work, as well as the quality and quantity of contribution of individual students. Further, the paper presents an analysis on how the average mark varies depending on how and which feedback factors are used in the grading process

Change Impact Analysis to Manage Process Evolutions: Managing Process Evolutions in Web-based Workflow Management Systems

Business processes are the pillars of an organisation that define and distinguish it from another. Advancements in web technologies persuade organisations to automate their processes as web-based Workflow Management Systems (WfMS). The paradox of process automation is the constant changes in processes that force the automated systems to evolve. Despite the claimed flexibility, replicating process changes in WfMS is still a challenging task. One reason for this is the lack of tools that support managing the impact of process changes. Therefore, this work introduces a framework that captures all process and automation related information completely and cohesively. The solution allows analysing the impact of process changes prior to making solid changes in WfMS. The solution is founded on an algebraic process modelling technique based on Kleene Algebra with Tests (KAT) and a tool named Process Evolution and Change Impact Analysis (PECIA) model. Although this solution is founded on deep theoretical concepts, these are presented in a very practical manner using a real-life process automation and management example; making this book an apt reading for both novice and expert researchers

An algorithm for propagating-impact analysis of process evolutions

Business processes evolve due to different reasons. Evolution of business processes essentially means changing its process elements namely: actions, participants, and process objects; which are associated to each other in various ways. In the event of one process element change, the above-mentioned associations create propagating-impact. Therefore in process evolution management, it is imperative to have a business process modelling tool that can completely and cohesively capture associations among process elements. In our previous research [1] we have developed such a process modelling tool using Kleene Algebra with Tests - KAT [2]. In this paper, we present an algorithm that facilitates locating the propagating-impact, of a process element change, across the entire process. The proposed mechanism initially, maps the KAT expression of a process, into a binary-tree structure. Then using this binary-tree, the created propagating-impact is extracted under four categories as Direct, Indirect, Secondary and Non-cautionary (DISN) impacts [1]

Transforming Healthcare Through Innovation in Digital Health: Selected Papers from Global Telehealth 2018

The term Telehealth covers a wide spectrum of disciplines, ranging from the enabling of direct clinical interventions to patient-centered care needs such as personal monitoring and care team support, as well as education, policy and professional aspects. Contributing to the solving of healthcare sustainability challenges and supporting the development and delivery of a wide range of innovative care and treatment models, Telehealth also acts as a major driver for change in global health issues. The book, presents the accepted full-paper, double-blinded, peer-reviewed contributions, as well as the editor-reviewed invited keynote papers, delivered at the 7th International Conference on Global Telehealth (GT2018), held in Colombo, Sri Lanka, on 10 and 11 October 2018. Approximately 50% of the total initial submissions were accepted. The conference provided a platform for the sharing of best practice and research directions across the international Telehealth community, and the 14 papers presented here deal with a variety of themes ranging from data collection and analysis to the design of interventions and delivery mechanisms, in situations from public health and primary care through to consumer health informatics, and from implementation and algorithm design to privacy and ethical considerations

Workflow management issues in virtual enterprise networks

Increasing competitive pressure and availability of Internet and related technologies have stimulated the collaboration of independent businesses. Such collaborations, aimed at achieving common business goals, are referred to as virtual enterprise networks (VENs). Though web is an excellent platform to collaborate, the requirements of VENs regarding workflow management systems are in excess those of autonomous organizations. This paper provides a comprehensive overview of numerous issues related to workflow managements in VENs. These issues are discussed in the three phases of virtual enterprise lifecycle: configuration, operation and dissolution; and corroborated by two real case studies of VENs in Australia. This book contains substantially extended and revised versions of the best papers from the 12th International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems (ICEIS 2010), held in Funchal, Madeira, Portugal, June 8-12, 2010

Comparative evaluation of accuracy of selected machine learning classification techniques for diagnosis of cancer : a data mining approach

With recent trends in Big Data and advancements in Information and Communication Technologies, the healthcare industry is at the stage of its transition from clinician oriented to technology oriented. Many people around the world die of cancer because the diagnosis of disease was not done at an early stage. Nowadays, the computational methods in the form of Machine Learning (ML) are used to develop automated decision support systems that can diagnose cancer with high confidence in a timely manner. This paper aims to carry out the comparative evaluation of a selected set of ML classifiers on two existing datasets: breast cancer and cervical cancer. The ML classifiers compared in this study are Decision Tree (DT), Support Vector Machine (SVM), k-Nearest Neighbor (k-NN), Logistic Regression, Ensemble (Bagged Tree) and Artificial Neural Networks (ANN). The evaluation is carried out based on standard evaluation metrics Precision (P), Recall (R), F1-score and Accuracy. The experimental results based on the evaluation metrics show that ANN showed the highest-level accuracy (99.4%) when tested with breast cancer dataset. On the other hand, when these ML classifiers are tested with the cervical cancer dataset, Ensemble (Bagged Tree) technique gave better accuracy (93.1%) in comparison to other classifiers

Capstone project collaborations between inherently diverse disciplines : two comparative case studies

While cross-disciplinary collaborations between students are encouraged in the university setting, there are many issues in achieving this learning outcome. In particular, when the disciplines are inherently diverse (e.g. computing and architecture) and use very different learning and teaching approaches, this type of collaborations can give mixed results. This paper discusses the successes and failures of cross-disciplinary collaborations involving three diverse disciplines via two case studies. In addition to describing the diverse nature of the learning and teaching approaches adopted in each case study, the paper identifies curriculum and assessment design, the commitment of program coordinators, the structure and dynamics of the collaborative student relationships, and differing scholarly cultures as the main factors that decide the success of such collaborations. The paper highlights the need for re-thinking the learning and teaching approaches needed to facilitate the collaboration between inherently different disciplines

Distributed knowledge-based computer-assisted clinical coding system

Free-text clinical narratives recorded during clinical care are used for secondary purposes such as clinical coding and subsequent statistical analysis. The current process of manual clinical coding is time-consuming, expensive and error prone. Computer-Assisted Coding (CAC) systems have the potential to expedite this process. We aim to develop a distributed knowledge-based computer-assisted clinical coding system that can semi-automate the process of clinical coding. This paper, describes the initial phase of our work which currently uses the pattern matching method to assign ICD-10-AM and ACHI codes

A framework to enhance email based business processes

Despite the consensus that email is an important tool to handle a business process(BP), this prevailing tool poorly supports the tasks it needs to accomplish in a BP. A collection of interrelated business activities which solve a particular issue is commonly known as a BP. The performance of BP is vital for the growth and development of a business. The ineffective performance of BP is a major, yet avoidable, obstacle to the business productivity. Diverse technologies bear weight in enhancing the performance of BP. The technology involved in BP plays a dominant role in BP streamlining. Over the last decade, email has been embraced, not only by the organizations of every shape and form, but also by individuals as a very popular communication technology. The ubiquitous and simple nature of email makes it a suitable candidate to be used as a technology to support BP related communication However, email poorly supports the task of handling BPes, due to its ad-hoc and heavi y distributed nature. In addition, the primary messaging metaphor of most email clients is not optimized for the activities of a BP. But they only address the problem of anaging the volume of email. Therefore this paper provides a solution to enhance the use of email for performing BP related activities efficiently and effectively, without changing email's fundamental technical infrastructure. The proposed solution is expected to achieve its objectives by means of a cognitive approach reducing huma intervention to the BP. In the proposed framework, when an email receives a BP activity, it is sent to the central server. The central server takes care of resolving the required next action based on the specified ordering of actions for that particular BP. Such a coordination via a central server, attempts to eliminate the ad-hoc and highly distributed nature of email that prevents it to be effectively used for BP related activities