Symposium - Preparing for Success: Readiness Models for Rural Telehealth

Background: Readiness is an integral and preliminary step in the successful implementation of telehealth services into existing health systems within rural communities. Methods and Materials: This paper details and critiques published international peer-reviewed studies that have focused on assessing telehealth readiness for rural and remote health. Background specific to readiness and change theories is provided, followed by a critique of identified telehealth readiness models, including a commentary on their readiness assessment tools. Results: Four current readiness models resulted from the search process. The four models varied across settings, such as rural outpatient practices, hospice programs, rural communities, as well as government agencies, national associations, and organizations. All models provided frameworks for readiness tools. Two specifically provided a mechanism by which communities could be categorized by their level of telehealth readiness. Discussion: Common themes across models included: an appreciation of practice context, strong leadership, and a perceived need to improve practice. Broad dissemination of these telehealth readiness models and tools is necessary to promote awareness and assessment of readiness. This will significantly aid organizations to facilitate the implementation of telehealth

From Topology to Phenotype in Protein–Protein Interaction Networks

We have recently witnessed an explosion in biological network data along with the development of computational approaches for their analyses. This new interdisciplinary research area is an integral part of systems biology, promising to provide new insights into organizational principles of life, as well as into evolution and disease. However, there is a danger that the area might become hindered by several emerging issues. In particular, there is typically a weak link between biological and computational scientists, resulting in the use of simple computational techniques of limited potential to explain these complex biological data. Hence, there is a danger that the community might view the topological features of network data as mere statistics, ignoring the value of the information contained in these data. This might result in the imposition of scientific doctrines, such as scale-free-centric (on the modelling side) and genome-centric (on the biological side) opinions onto this nascent research area. In this chapter, we take a network science perspective and present a brief, high-level overview of the area, commenting on possible challenges ahead. We focus on protein-protein interaction networks (PINs) in which nodes correspond to proteins in a cell and edges to physical bindings between the proteins. © 2010 Springer-Verlag London Limited