A pragmatics' view of patient identification

Patient identification is a central safety critical aspect of healthcare work. Most healthcare activities require identification of patients by healthcare staff, often in connection with the use of patient records. Indeed, the increasing reliance on electronic systems makes the correct matching of patients with their records a keystone for patient safety. Most research on patient identification has been carried out in hospital settings. The aim was to investigate the process of identification of patients and their records in the context of a primary healthcare clinic

Networking Hospital ePrescribing: A Systemic View of Digitalization of Medicines' Use in England.

Medicine management is at the core of hospital care and digitalization of prescribing and administration of medicines is often the focus of attention of health IT programs. This may be conveyed to the public in terms of the elimination of paper-based drug charts and increased readability of doctors' prescriptions. Based on analysis of documents about hospital medicines supply and use (including systems' implementation) in the UK, in this conceptual paper electronic prescribing and administration are repositioned as only one aspect of an important wider transformation in medicine management in hospital settings, involving, for example, procurement, dispensing, auditing, waste management, research and safety vigilance. Approaching digitalization from a systemic perspective has the potential to uncover the wider implications of this transformation for patients, the organization and the wider health care system

Cellular automaton model of precipitation/dissolution coupled with solute transport

Precipitation/dissolution reactions coupled with solute transport are modelled as a cellular automaton in which solute molecules perform a random walk on a regular lattice and react according to a local probabilistic rule. Stationary solid particles dissolve with a certain probability and, provided solid is already present or the solution is saturated, solute particles have a probability to precipitate. In our simulation of the dissolution of a solid block inside uniformly flowing water we obtain solid precipitation downstream from the original solid edge, in contrast to the standard reaction-transport equations. The observed effect is the result of fluctuations in solute density and diminishes when we average over a larger ensemble. The additional precipitation of solid is accompanied by a substantial reduction in the relatively small solute concentration. The model is appropriate for the study of the r\^ole of intrinsic fluctuations in the presence of reaction thresholds and can be employed to investigate porosity changes associated with the carbonation of cement.Comment: LaTeX file, 13 pages. To appear in Journal of Statistical Physics (Proceedings of Lattice Gas'94, June 1994, Princeton). Figures available from author. Requests may be submitted by E-mail ([email protected]) or ordinary mail (Paul Scherrer Institute, CH-5232 Villigen PSI, Switzerland

On the stability of periodic orbits in delay equations with large delay

We prove a necessary and sufficient criterion for the exponential stability of periodic solutions of delay differential equations with large delay. We show that for sufficiently large delay the Floquet spectrum near criticality is characterized by a set of curves, which we call asymptotic continuous spectrum, that is independent on the delay.Comment: postprint versio

Directional Freeze-Casting : A Bioinspired Method to Assemble Multifunctional Aligned Porous Structures for Advanced Applications

Herein, the potential of directional freeze-casting techniques as a very generic, green, and straightforward approach for the processing of various functional porous materials is introduced. These materials include 3D monoliths, films, fibers, and microspheres/beads, which are obtained by the assembly of network building blocks originated from cryoassembly of the various aqueous-based systems. The process simply relies on 1) directional freezing of the slurry through contact with a cold surface, 2) maintaining the slurry at the frozen state for a particular time with controlling the freezing parameters and directions, and 3) sublimation of the created ice crystal templates inside the developed structure to translate the ice growth pattern to final porous structure. The materials developed with such a cryogenic process contain a highly complex porous structure, e.g., a hierarchical and well-aligned microstructure in different levels, which renders a high control over the physicochemical and mechanical functionalities. Due to the versatility and controllability of this technique, the process can also be extended for the mimicking of the structures found in natural materials to the bulk materials to assemble bioinspired porous composites with many useful mechanical and physical features. The aim, herein, is to give a brief overview of the recent advances in developing anisotropic porous inorganic, organic, hybrid, and carbonaceous materials with a particular emphasis on materials with biomimicking microstructure using directional ice templating approach and to highlight their recent breakthrough for different high-performance applications.Peer reviewe

Procolipase gene : no association with early-onset obesity or fat intake

Copyright 2009 S. Karger AG, Basel.Peer reviewedPublisher PD