Data Quality Information and Decision Making: A Healthcare Case Study

Defining data quality and realising the need for information that is free of defects and that possesses the right qualities for the task at hand remains a difficult issue. This is particularly so in the healthcare sector where the need for effective decision making is high. This case study addresses the development of a data quality evaluation framework for the NZ health sector. It discusses a data quality strategy that underpins the application of the framework and defines a vision for data quality management in the health sector. It discusses how the framework and strategy combine to increase intelligence density. A significant outcome from the case identified the difficulty of getting data users and managers at all levels to understand the imperative of data quality and accept responsibility for its improvement and maintenance. Recommendations for further research are made

Mobile Health and Chronic Disease Management: Moving Towards a Holistic Approach

Mobile technologies are anticipated to offer cost effective and efficient information management solutions for the chronic care sector. The increasing incidence of chronic diseases is leading to severe pressure on healthcare services struggling to meet increased demand. Although mobile technical solutions are being developed, there is little understanding of the issues affecting acceptability and sustainability of mobile health initiatives and the requirements for the development of holistic care services. This research uses a qualitative study to determine the potential for implementation of m-health across the spectrum of chronic disease care and to identify key factors affecting the stakeholders. While study participants paint an optimistic future for m-health, there remain several challenges before a holistic approach can be achieved, not least the standardisation and integration of information across the whole health sector

Design Considerations for a Disaster eHealth Appliance

Disaster eHealth is a new area of research and endeavour. In order to make a practical contribution Disaster eHealth approaches should consider the role of a Disaster eHealth appliance. Both disaster management and disaster medicine may find that such approaches allow critical information to be gathered and situational awareness improved. This paper proposes the development of a Disaster eHealth appliance to support self-care of chronic disease and caregiving by others. Injuries and disease caused by the disaster may be also supported by this approach. It also attempts to address some of the potential problems and suggest some solutions for the use of such appliances. Re-using existing devices may offer a relatively low-cost and sustainable approach to providing such devices, and infrastructure to use them. &nbsp

The live sheep export industry

Australia\u27s live sheep trade to Middle Eastern countries is an important export industry. However, about 2 per cent of the sheep die, mainly during the sea voyage. The Western Australian Department of Agriculture has conducted a major research programme to improve the health and welfare of sheep during live export. The programme has\u27examined many aspects of the export sheep industry, and a substantial part of it has focused on why sheep die during sea transport

Pinpointing What is Wrong With Cross-Agency Collaboration in Disaster Healthcare

A disaster is an event in which a hazard has a destructive environmental or ecological impact on such a scale that the effects cannot be managed within local community resources. In disaster healthcare, the main responders to provide emergency relief are usually emergency management and health personnel. Although these two sectors share the same vision of providing public health services to disaster victims, post-disaster analysis reflects poor communication between them leading to delayed, substandard and even unavailable healthcare. This paper investigates the barriers to smooth and effective communication between health and emergency management personnel in a disaster, with the aim of pinpointing possible points of improvement. The paper presents a comprehensive review of the available literature on the subject and suggests suitable interventions to enhance healthcare delivery through cross-agency collaboration and information exchange based on a projected telehealth system

Disaster E-Health Framework for Community Resilience

Disaster management and the health sector ought to be natural allies, but there are few examples of the collaborative planning and application of disaster healthcare involving emergency managers and care practitioners. The different origins, culture, and priorities of the various agencies tasked with disaster healthcare mean that communication and coordination between them is often lacking, leading to delayed, sub-standard, or inappropriate care for disaster victims. The potential of the new e-health technologies, such as the electronic health record, telehealth and mobile health, that are revolutionizing non-disaster healthcare, is also not being realised. These circumstances have led to an international project to develop a disaster e-health framework that can inform national disaster and health strategies. This paper describes this project and its extension to embrace community resilience that strengthens preparedness, safeguards life during the disaster phase, and assists long-term recovery to preserve the health and basic values of citizens

Computerized System to Enhance Situation Awareness: Key Challenges Associated with the Design, Evaluation, and Extension of a Prototype

ABSTRACT Successful decision making and task execution in emergency management require appropriate levels of situation awareness (SA). This paper proposes an ontology-based model for the design of a computer-based system, Situation Aware Vigilant Emergency Reasoner (SAVER) that supports the individual, shared and team SA of managers in emergency situations. SAVER is evaluated in simulated experiments that demonstrate the improvements in SA performance. The paper provides a complete description of the SAVER design, implementation, evaluation and its proposed extension from a proof-of-concept to a production environment

The invalidity of a strong capacity for a quantum channel with memory

The strong capacity of a particular channel can be interpreted as a sharp limit on the amount of information which can be transmitted reliably over that channel. To evaluate the strong capacity of a particular channel one must prove both the direct part of the channel coding theorem and the strong converse for the channel. Here we consider the strong converse theorem for the periodic quantum channel and show some rather surprising results. We first show that the strong converse does not hold in general for this channel and therefore the channel does not have a strong capacity. Instead, we find that there is a scale of capacities corresponding to error probabilities between integer multiples of the inverse of the periodicity of the channel. A similar scale also exists for the random channel.Comment: 7 pages, double column. Comments welcome. Repeated equation removed and one reference adde

The Role of Patient Identification in Patient Safety

Matching the right patient with the right care is at the heart of safe healthcare. Patient wristbands form a vital link between the patient, local information systems, care delivery and the wider healthcare system. At present there is no standardisation across the NHS for wristband design. Colour coded wristbands have been introduced by some organisations as a barrier to patient safety incidents but there is disparity in the coding systems used between, and sometimes within, healthcare settings. This paper presents some of the human factors issues surrounding patient identification, a survey of current practice across the NHS in England and Wales and steps towards standardisation of wristbands

The Role of e-Health in Disasters: A Strategy for Education, Training and Integration in Disaster Medicine

This paper describes the origins and progress of an international project to advance disaster eHealth (DEH) – the application of eHealth technologies to enhance the delivery of healthcare in disasters. The study to date has focused on two major themes; the role of DEH in facilitating inter-agency communication in disaster situations, and the fundamental need to promote awareness of DEH in the education of disaster managers and health professionals. The paper deals mainly with on-going research on the second of these themes, surveying the current provision of disaster medicine education, the design considerations for a DEH programme for health professionals, the key curriculum topics, and the optimal delivery mode