Cancer patients’ experiences of error and consequences during diagnosis and treatment

The study objective was to investigate patient experienced error during diagnosis and treatment of cancer. The design included a nationwide patient survey on quality and safety in Danish cancer care. Responses regarding patient experienced error were separately analyzed, quantitative responses using descriptive statistics and qualitative responses using systematic text analysis. Study participants included 6,720 adult patients with a first time diagnosis of cancer registered between May 1st and August 31st 2010. The patients received a questionnaire concerning their experiences of care received by general practitioners, specialist practitioners and at the hospital. A response rate of 65% was achieved. 10 – 25% of patients experienced error during diagnosis or treatment. 61% reported that hospital errors had consequences. Unexpected surgical errors/complications (27%), delay due to doctors’ assessment errors (24%) and unavailable test results (21%) were the most frequent types of errors identified using closed questions. 819 qualitative responses supplemented this information and revealed errors related to cancer detection, planning & coordination, patient-provider communication, administrative processes and treatment & medication. Physical, psychological, social as well as organizational consequences of the errors were uncovered. Patient experiences of errors suggest that practices related to informed consent, diagnostic reasoning as well as handling of test results, referrals and the medical chart should be further improved. In addition, safety aspects of the patient-provider communication and involvement of patients as an extra safety barrier merit further study

Characterizing a social bookmarking and tagging network

Social networks and collaborative tagging systems are rapidly gaining popularity as a primary means for storing and sharing data among friends, family, colleagues, or perfect strangers as long as they have common interests. del.icio.us is a social network where people store and share their personal bookmarks. Most importantly, users tag their bookmarks for ease of information dissemination and later look up. However, it is the friendship links, that make delicious a social network. They exist independently of the set of bookmarks that belong to the users and have no relation to the tags typically assigned to the bookmarks. To study the interaction among users, the strength of the existing links and their hidden meaning, we introduce implicit links in the network. These links connect only highly “similar” users. Here, similarity can reflect different aspects of the user’s profile that makes her similar to any other user, such as number of shared bookmarks, or similarity of their tags clouds. We investigate the question whether friends have common interests, we gain additional insights on the strategies that users use to assign tags to their bookmarks, and we demonstrate that the graphs formed by implicit links have unique properties differing from binomial random graphs or random graphs with an expected power-law degree distribution

A systems analysis of information system requirements for an experimental farm

A systems analysis and design of information requirements for an experimental farm is presented. This study was carried out on the university farm (UF) at the University of Copenhagen in Denmark. The UF has several farm sites, many employees and clients, and collects data on the spatial variability of sites for site-specific management, and is responsible for running field trials. Soft and hard system analyses were performed to better understand the information needs and design an information system for the UF. Soft systems methodology was used to analyse the human activities and to identify user requirements, while a hard systems methodology was used to structure the data handling inside the farm office. The resulting information management system (IMS) includes modules for storage, processing and presentation of spatio-temporal data for research trials and site-specific management. A GIS-based farm IMS including the necessary interfaces was implemented and validated by the UF manager and staff. Limitations and constraints to the full implementation of the IMS in an experimental farm are also discussed