Cybersecurity Awareness Month Newsletter: Week 4: The Future of Connected Devices, 2020

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OIT 2010 Annual Report on Information Technology

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OIT 2009 Annual Report on Information Technology

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OIT 2013 Annual Report : Information Technology in Maine State Government

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OIT 2005 Annual Report on Information Technology in Maine State Government

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Summer Youth Blog

In an effort to expose youth to careers in information technology and journalism, Urban Scholars, the Office of Information Technology, and the Office of Communications partnered this past summer to offer two high school graduates an internship focusing on the development of a summer youth blog. The two interns, Jennie Lai and Trammel Griffith, who currently attend UMass Boston and Mass College of Liberal Arts respectively, were mentored by UMass Boston staff Akunna Rosser, Colleen Locke, and Lisa Link. The interns were given the task of developing a blog that would publicize the many youth programs on UMass Boston’s campus during the summer, including Camp Shriver, Project ALERTA, Project REACH, Talented and Gifted Program (TAG), and Urban Scholars. Jennie and Trammel’s blog became the first blog promoting the services offered by each UMass Boston summer program. Overall, this unique partnership between Urban Scholars and the Office of Information Technology has not only offered meaningful job experiences and personal development opportunities to low-income/first-generation college-bound youth, but has also exemplified the university’s commitment to community engagement and a culture of learning

Validation of the treatment identification strategy of the HEDIS addiction quality measures: concordance with medical record review

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Strategies to accurately identify the occurrence of specific health care events in administrative data is central to many quality improvement and research efforts. Many health care quality measures have treatment identification strategies based on diagnosis and procedure codes - an approach that is inexpensive and feasible but usually of unknown validity. In this study, we examined if the diagnosis/procedure code combinations used in the 2006 HEDIS Initiation and Engagement quality measures to identify instances of addiction treatment have high concordance with documentation of addiction treatment in clinical progress notes.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>Four type of records were randomly sampled from VHA electronic medical data: (a) Outpatient records from a substance use disorder (SUD) specialty clinic with a HEDIS-qualified substance use disorder (SUD) diagnosis/CPT code combination (n = 700), (b) Outpatient records from a non-SUD setting with a HEDIS-qualified SUD diagnosis/CPT code combination (n = 592), (c) Specialty SUD Inpatient/residential records that included a SUD diagnosis (n = 700), and (d) Non-SUD specialty Inpatient/residential records that included a SUD diagnosis (n = 700). Clinical progress notes for the sampled records were extracted and two raters classified each as documenting or not documenting addiction treatment. Rates of concordance between the HEDIS addiction treatment identification strategy and the raters' judgments were calculated for each record type.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>Within SUD outpatient clinics and SUD inpatient specialty units, 92% and 98% of sampled records had chart evidence of addiction treatment. Of outpatient encounters with a qualifying diagnosis/procedure code combination outside of SUD clinics, 63% had chart evidence of addiction treatment. Within non-SUD specialty inpatient units, only 46% of sampled records had chart evidence of addiction treatment.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>For records generated in SUD specialty settings, the HEDIS strategy of identifying SUD treatment with diagnosis and procedure codes has a high concordance with chart review. The concordance rate outside of SUD specialty settings is much lower and highly variable between facilities. Therefore, some patients may be counted as meeting the 2006 HEDIS Initiation and Engagement criteria without having received the specified amount (or any) addiction treatment.</p

Does Choose & Book fail to deliver the expected choice to patients? A survey of patients' experience of outpatient appointment booking

Provisional abstract: Background: Choose and Book is a central part of the UK Government patient choice agenda that seeks to provide patients with a choice over the time, date and place of their first outpatient appointment. This is done through the use of a computerised booking system. After a 2004 pilot study, Choose and Book was formally launched in January 2006. This is the first study of patient experience of Choose and Book since then. Methods: A questionnaire survey of reported experience of choice over the time, data and place of appointment, carried out in a National Health Service hospital in London. 104 patients at their first outpatient appointment completed the questionnaire, consisting of a consecutive series of patients referred through Choose and Book and a sample referred through the conventional booking system. Results: Among the Choose and Book patients, 66% (31/47; 95% CI 52 to 78%) reported not being given a choice of appointment date, 66% (31/47; 95% CI 52 to 78%) reported not being given a choice of appointment time, 86% (37/43; 95% CI 74 to 94%) reported being given a choice of fewer than four hospitals in total and 32% (15/47; 95% CI 20 to 46%) reported not being given any choice of hospital. Conclusions: In this study, patients did not experience the degree of choice that Choose and Book was designed to deliver

Self-reported knowledge, correct knowledge and use of UK drinking guidelines among a representative sample of the English population

Aims: Promotion of lower risk drinking guidelines is a commonly used public health intervention with various purposes, including communicating alcohol consumption risks, informing drinkers' decision-making and, potentially, changing behaviour. UK drinking guidelines were revised in 2016. To inform potential promotion of the new guidelines, we aimed to examine public knowledge and use of the previous drinking guidelines, including by population subgroup. Methods: A demographically representative, cross-sectional online survey of 2100 adults living in England in July 2015 (i.e. two decades after adoption of previous guidelines and prior to introduction of new guidelines). Univariate and multivariate logistic regressions examined associations between demographic variables, alcohol consumption (AUDIT-C), smoking, and knowledge of health conditions and self-reported knowledge and use of drinking guidelines. Multinomial logistic regression examined the same set of variables in relation to accurate knowledge of drinking guidelines (underestimation, accurate-estimation, overestimation). Results: In total, 37.8% of drinkers self-reported knowing their own-gender drinking guideline, of whom 66.2% gave an accurate estimate. Compared to accurate estimation, underestimation was associated with male gender, lower education and AUDIT-C score, while overestimation was associated with smoking. Few (20.8%) reported using guidelines to monitor drinking at least sometimes. Drinking guideline use was associated with higher education, overestimating guidelines and lower AUDIT-C. Correctly endorsing a greater number of health conditions as alcohol-related was associated with self-reported knowledge of guidelines, but was not consistently associated with accurate estimation or use to monitor drinking. Conclusions: Two decades after their introduction, previous UK drinking guidelines were not well known or used by current drinkers. Those who reported using them tended to overestimate recommended daily limits. SHORT SUMMARY: We examined public knowledge and use of UK drinking guidelines just before new guidelines were released (2016). Despite previous guidelines being in place for two decades, only one in four drinkers accurately estimated these, with even fewer using guidelines to monitor drinking. Approximately 8% of drinkers overestimated maximum daily limits

Self-archiving and the Copyright Transfer Agreements of ISI-ranked library and information science journals

A study of Thomson-Scientific ISI ranked Library and Information Science (LIS) journals (n = 52) is reported. The study examined the stances of publishers as expressed in the Copyright Transfer Agreements (CTAs) of the journals toward self-archiving, the practice of depositing digital copies of one\u27s works in an Open Archives Initiative (OAI)-compliant open access repository. Sixty-two percent (32) do not make their CTAs available on the open Web; 38% (20) do. Of the 38% that do make CTAs available, two are open access journals. Of the 62% that do not have a publicly available CTA, 40% are silent about self-archiving. Even among the 20 journal CTAs publicly available there is a high level of ambiguity. Closer examination augmented by publisher policy documents on copyright, self-archiving, and instructions to authors reveals that only five, 10% of the ISI-ranked LIS journals in the study, actually prohibit self-archiving by publisher rule. Copyright is a moving target, but publishers appear to be acknowledging that copyright and open access can co-exist in scholarly journal publishing. The ambivalence of LIS journal publishers provides unique opportunities to members of the community. Authors can self-archive in open access archives. A society-led, global scholarly communication consortium can engage in the strategic building of the LIS information commons. Aggregating OAI-compliant archives and developing disciplinary-specific library services for an LIS commons has the potential to increase the field\u27s research impact and visibility. It may also ameliorate its own scholarly communication and publishing systems and serve as a model for others