Duke Surgery Patient Safety: an open-source application for anonymous reporting of adverse and near-miss surgical events

BACKGROUND: Studies have shown that 4% of hospitalized patients suffer from an adverse event caused by the medical treatment administered. Some institutions have created systems to encourage medical workers to report these adverse events. However, these systems often prove to be inadequate and/or ineffective for reviewing the data collected and improving the outcomes in patient safety. OBJECTIVE: To describe the Web-application Duke Surgery Patient Safety, designed for the anonymous reporting of adverse and near-miss events as well as scheduled reporting to surgeons and hospital administration. SOFTWARE ARCHITECTURE: DSPS was developed primarily using Java language running on a Tomcat server and with MySQL database as its backend. RESULTS: Formal and field usability tests were used to aid in development of DSPS. Extensive experience with DSPS at our institution indicate that DSPS is easy to learn and use, has good speed, provides needed functionality, and is well received by both adverse-event reporters and administrators. DISCUSSION: This is the first description of an open-source application for reporting patient safety, which allows the distribution of the application to other institutions in addition for its ability to adapt to the needs of different departments. DSPS provides a mechanism for anonymous reporting of adverse events and helps to administer Patient Safety initiatives. CONCLUSION: The modifiable framework of DSPS allows adherence to evolving national data standards. The open-source design of DSPS permits surgical departments with existing reporting mechanisms to integrate them with DSPS. The DSPS application is distributed under the GNU General Public License

Influence of Forest Structure and Composition on Summer Habitat Use of Wildlife in an Upland Hardwood Forest

Oak-hickory (Quercus-Carya spp.) forest types are widespread across the midwestern United States, but changes in forest disturbance regimes are resulting in little to no oak recruitment and a compositional shift to shade-tolerant, mesophytic species, such as American beech (Fagus grandifolia) and sugar maple (Acer saccharum). We conducted camera trap surveys in a mature upland hardwood forest of southern Illinois, USA during May to August 2015–2016 to document mammal summer habitat use in relation to forest structure and composition to further understand how regional shifts in forests may affect mammal communities. With nearly 4000 camera days of effort, we modeled occupancy patterns for white-tailed deer (Odocoileus virginianus), raccoon (Procyon lotor), and eastern gray squirrel (Sciurus canadensis). Forest composition models outcompeted forest structure models for white-tailed deer, where we observed a statistically significant negative relationship between white-tailed deer habitat use and beech dominance. Further, we found a strong, positive association between deer and oak dominance. Model selection indicated little support for within-stand forest structure or composition characteristics influencing habitat use for raccoons. Eastern gray squirrel occurrence was best described by forest composition, revealing a positive relationship with beech–maple importance values. Our predictive models indicated that the impact of forest changes underway will have varying impacts on wildlife species. We can expect changes in habitat use patterns to be more pronounced with time barring revised forest management practices, and these changes are likely to be most influential at the landscape-scale. We conclude that a patchwork mosaic of forest conditions will likely best support a diverse and abundant mammal community across the region

Near-infrared absorbing semitransparent organic solar cells

We present efficient, semitransparent small molecule organic solar cells. The devices employ an indium tin oxide-free top contact, consisting of thin metal films and an additional organic capping layer for enhanced light in/outcoupling. The solar cell encorporates a bulk heterojunction with the donor material Ph2-benz-bodipy, an infrared absorber. Combination of Ph2-benz-bodipy with C60 as acceptor leads to devices with high open circuit voltages of up to 0.81 V and short circuit current densities of 5–6 mA/cm2, resulting in efficiences of 2.2%–2.5%. At the same time, the devices are highly transparent, with an average transmittance in the visible range (400–750 nm) of up to 47.9%, with peaks at 538 nm of up to 64.2% and an average transmittance in the yellow-green range of up to 61.8%. © 2011 American Institute of Physics.</em

Single-Camera Trap Survey Designs Miss Detections: Impacts on Estimates of Occupancy and Community Metrics - Fig 2

<p>Comparison of (A) mean detections and (B) species richness detected per camera-site represented by one-, two-, and four-camera camera survey methods.</p

Location of Trail of Tears State Forest in southwestern Illinois, USA.

<p>Black squares represent camera-site locations. Panel (A) shows the location of the study site within the state of Illinois, USA, panel (B) illustrates the distribution of camera-sites at the study site, and panel (C) depicts how camera traps were deployed and arranged at a camera-site (Basemap source: ESRI, Redlands, CA, USA).</p

Species detected in southern Illinois during Dec 2015 –Feb 2016, and the number of detections recorded and retained for analysis.

<p>Species detected in southern Illinois during Dec 2015 –Feb 2016, and the number of detections recorded and retained for analysis.</p