Defining and Testing EMR Usability: Principles and Proposed Methods of EMR Usability Evaluation and Rating

For more information about the Information Experience Laboratory, visit http://ielab.missouri.edu/Electronic medical record (EMR) adoption rates have been slower than expected in the United States, especially in comparison to other industry sectors and other developed countries. A key reason, aside from initial costs and lost productivity during EMR implementation, is lack of efficiency and usability of EMRs currently available. Achieving the healthcare reform goals of broad EMR adoption and “meaningful use” will require that efficiency and usability be effectively addressed at a fundamental level. We conducted a literature review of usability principles, especially those applicable to EMRs. The key principles identified were simplicity, naturalness, consistency, minimizing cognitive load, efficient interactions, forgiveness and feedback, effective use of language, effective information presentation, and preservation of context. Usability is often mistakenly equated with user satisfaction, which is an oversimplification. We describe methods of usability evaluation, offering several alternative methods for measuring efficiency and effectiveness, including patient safety. We provide samples of objective, repeatable and cost‐efficient test scenarios applicable to evaluating EMR usability as an adjunct to certification, and we discuss rating schema for scoring the results. (42 pages

The Development of Higher Education Administration as a Profession

The forces that contributed to specialization and diversification are changing

Wpływ glukozy i pobudzenia emocjonalnego na pamięć studentów

This study investigated the effect of glucose administration and emotional arousal on memory. Participants were undergraduate college students randomly assigned to glucose (50 g glucose) and placebo groups (50.6 mg saccharine) and further divided into high and low emotional arousal groups. High and low emotional arousal groups were shown a slide show whose content was either emotionally arousing or emotionally neutral, respectively. Blood glucose measurements were taken, and memory recall and recognition tests were given at various intervals throughout the experiment. Glucose improved memory for immediate recall in females only, while emotional arousal resulted in enhanced immediate and delayed recall for all subjects. Furthermore, emotional arousal enhanced recognition memory for males only. While the present findings confirm the facilitatory effects of glucose and emotional arousal on memory, they simultaneously stimulate more questions on the differences in the effect of these two factors on memory in males versus females.Celem badania było sprawdzenie wpływu podania glukozy, oraz pobudzenia emocjonalnego, na pamięć. Uczestnikami byli studenci przydzieleni losowo do grup glukozy (50 g glukozy) i grup placebo (50,6 mg sacharyny), a następnie podzieleni na grupy o wysokim i niskim poziomie podniecenia emocjonalnego. Grupom o wysokim i niskim poziomie podniecenia emocjonalnego pokazano zestaw slajdów, którego treść była odpowiednio pobudzająca emocjonalnie lub neutralna emocjonalnie. Wykonano pomiary glukozy we krwi, a testy pamięci i rozpoznawania były przeprowadzane w różnych odstępach czasu w trakcie eksperymentu. Glukoza poprawiła pamięć natychmiastową tylko u kobiet, podczas gdy pobudzenie emocjonalne poprawiło zarówno pamięć natychmiastową, jak i przywoływanie wspomnień u wszystkich badanych. Pobudzenie emocjonalne poprawiło pamięć rozpoznawczą tylko u mężczyzn. Chociaż przedstawione w artykule odkrycia potwierdzają usprawniające działanie glukozy i pobudzenia emocjonalnego na pamięć, jednocześnie prowokują więcej pytań na temat różnic we wpływie tych dwóch czynników na pamięć u mężczyzn i kobiet

Neural activation associated with the cognitive emotion regulation of sadness in healthy children

AbstractWhen used effectively, cognitive reappraisal of distressing events is a highly adaptive cognitive emotion regulation (CER) strategy, with impairments in cognitive reappraisal associated with greater risk for psychopathology. Despite extensive literature examining the neural correlates of cognitive reappraisal in healthy and psychiatrically ill adults, there is a dearth of data to inform the neural bases of CER in children, a key gap in the literature necessary to map the developmental trajectory of cognitive reappraisal. In this fMRI study, psychiatrically healthy schoolchildren were instructed to use cognitive reappraisal to modulate their emotional reactions and responses of negative affect after viewing sad photos. Consistent with the adult literature, when actively engaged in reappraisal compared to passively viewing sad photos, children showed increased activation in the vlPFC, dlPFC, and dmPFC as well as in parietal and temporal lobe regions. When children used cognitive reappraisal to minimize their experience of negative affect after viewing sad stimuli they exhibited dampened amygdala responses. Results are discussed in relation to the importance of identifying and characterizing neural processes underlying adaptive CER strategies in typically developing children in order to understand how these systems go awry and relate to the risk and occurrence of affective disorders

Water Entry of a Simple Harmonic Oscillator

When a blunt body impacts an air-water interface, large hydrodynamic forces often arise, a phenomenon many of us have unfortunately experienced in a failed dive or "belly flop." Beyond assessing risk to biological divers, an understanding and methods for remediation of such slamming forces are critical to the design of numerous engineered naval and aerospace structures. Herein we systematically investigate the role of impactor elasticity on the resultant structural loads in perhaps the simplest possible scenario: the water entry of a simple harmonic oscillator. Contrary to conventional intuition, we find that "softening" the impactor does not always reduce the peak impact force, but may also increase the force as compared to a fully rigid counterpart. Through our combined experimental and theoretical investigation, we demonstrate that the transition from force reduction to force amplification is delineated by a critical "hydroelastic" factor that relates the hydrodynamic and elastic timescales of the problem

Brain-behavior relationships in the experience and regulation of negative emotion in healthy children: Implications for risk for childhood depression

Structural and functional alterations in a variety of brain regions have been associated with depression and risk for depression across the life span. A majority of these regions are associated with emotion reactivity and/or regulation. However, it is generally unclear what mechanistic role these alterations play in the etiology of depression. A first step toward understanding this is to characterize the relationships between variation in brain structure/function and individual differences in depression severity and related processes, particularly emotion regulation. To this end, the current study examines how brain structure and function predict concurrent and longitudinal measures of depression symptomology and emotion regulation skills in psychiatrically healthy school-age children (N = 60). Specifically, we found that smaller hippocampus volumes and greater responses to sad faces in emotion reactivity regions predict increased depressive symptoms at the time of scan, whereas larger amygdala volumes, smaller insula volumes, and greater responses in emotion reactivity regions predict decreased emotion regulation skills. In addition, larger insula volumes predict improvements in emotion regulation skills even after accounting for emotion regulation at the time of scan. Understanding brain–behavior relationships in psychiatrically healthy samples, especially early in development, will help inform normative developmental trajectories and neural alterations in depression and other affective pathology