Clinicians' Knowledge and Perception of Telemedicine Technology

INTRODUCTION: Telemedicine is an application of information and communication technology in the healthcare environment. This study aimed to compare knowledge and perceptions of telemedicine technology among different groups of clinicians. METHODS: This survey study was conducted in 2013. The potential participants included 532 clinicians who worked in two hospitals and three clinics in a northern province of Iran. Data were collected using a five-point Likert-scale questionnaire. The content validity of the questionnaire was checked, and the reliability was calculated using Cronbach's alpha coefficient (α = 0.73). RESULTS: The results showed that most of the clinicians (96.1 percent) had little knowledge about telemedicine. They perceived the advantages of telemedicine at a moderate level and its disadvantages at a low level. The knowledge of dentists about this technology was less than that of other groups, and as a result they were less positive about the advantages of telemedicine compared to nurses, general physicians, and specialists. CONCLUSION: The limited knowledge of clinicians about telemedicine seems to have influenced their perceptions of the technology. Therefore, providing healthcare professionals with more information about new technologies in healthcare, such as telemedicine, can help to gain a more realistic picture of their perceptions

Variational Analysis And Stability In Optimization

The dissertation is devoted to the study of the so-called full Lipschitzian stability of local solutions to finite-dimensional parameterized problems of constrained optimization, which has been well recognized as a very important property from both viewpoints of optimization theory and its applications. Employing second-order subdifferentials of variational analysis, we obtain necessary and sufficient conditions for fully stable local minimizers in general classes of constrained optimization problems including problems of composite optimization as well as problems of nonlinear programming with twice continuously differentiable data. Based on our recent explicit calculations of the second-order subdifferential for convex piecewise linear functions, we establish relationships between nondegeneracy and second-order qualification for fully amenable compositions involving piecewise linear functions and obtain new applications of the developed second-order theory to full stability in composite optimization and constrained minimax problems, strong regularity of associate generalized equations and strong stability of stationary points for composite optimization. Finally, we discuss the important concept of critical multipliers for composite optimization problems and characterize it via second-order subdifferentials. Then we demonstrate that full stability can rule out the existence of critical multipliers in the mentioned framework