eHealth Equity: Current Perspectives

Health justice is something that every country in the world needs. However, the existence of health disparities among different social groups and geographical regions in various countries of the world is inevitable. These health inequalities are a major obstacle in achieving health justice. There are a number of factors affecting health equity such as socio-economic status, education level, age, religion, geographical position, racial and ethnical differences, gender minorities, environmental factors, accessibility level to healthcare services and resources, and also the quality of healthcare. Although eHealth has the potential of eliminating health inequalities leading to the establishment of health justice, it is essential that governments and health policy makers provide some measures to diminish major barriers facing the society members especially the elderly, poor, uneducated, and disabled people when implementing it. This can result in attaining the advantages of eHealth for establishing health equity

Development of Information and decisions management Software for educational council minutes of Medical Sciences Universities

     Minutes of educational councils in universities always contain valuable organizational knowledge and play an important role in micro and macro educational decision makings. Lack of storage system, organization and retrieval of these documents can be a major obstacle in the way of utilizing these precious documents. Designing and implementing of an appropriate software to manage minutes of educational councils can facilitate classifying these important documents and ease the access and visibility of their content as well. Therefore based on the structure and the content of educational council minutes of one school of medical sciences universities as a sample and the views of key stakeholders, researchers tried to design and implement a software for information and decisions management of minutes. This research is of developmental- applied type. In order to design the software, object-oriented analysis is used. In the analysis step, at first requirements are identified, extracted and defined based on the descriptive cataloging and subject analyzing of educational councils minutes and after final analysis, the required diagrams were drawn. Software architecture is determined based on the list of requirements and finally the drawn diagrams are converted to programming codes using C# programming language. In the end, the produced software has been tested to ensure its adaptation to the objectives of project and the defined requirements. In this study, it was tried that the designed software leads to the development of electronic database for minutes in order that the universities could have access to content and decisions of these meetings in due time and in appropriate manner. Despite the numerous capabilities of this software, it seems necessary that it be used more widely in order that we could review its improvement and optimization during its implementation in the actual operating environment. Subsequently, it is recommended that Universities of Medical Sciences use the software for information management and their educational meetings to facilitate the process of organizing, storing and retrieving of the documents. They can also contribute to the process of software upgrade for educational meetings in other universities

Difficulties of Diagnosing Alzheimer's Disease: The Application of Clinical Decision Support Systems

Introduction: Alzheimer's disease is one of the most common causes of dementia, which gradually causes cognitive impairment. Diagnosis of Alzheimer's disease is a complicated process performed through several tests and examinations. Design and development of Clinical Decision Support System (CDSS) could be an appropriate approach for eliminating the existing difficulties of diagnosing Alzheimer's disease. Materials and Methods: This study reviews the current problems in the diagnosis of Alzheimer's disease with an approach to the application of CDSS. The study reviewed the articles published from 1990 to 2016. The articles were identified by searching electronic databases such as PubMed, Google Scholar, Science Direct. Considering the relevance of articles with the objectives of the study, 29 papers were selected. According to the performed investigations, various reasons cause difficulty in Alzheimer's diagnosis. Results: The complexity of diagnostic process and  the similarity of Alzheimer's disease with other causes of dementia are the most important of them. The results of studies about the application of CDSSs on Alzheimer's disease diagnosis indicated that the implementation of these systems could help to eliminate the existing difficulties in the diagnosis of Alzheimer's disease. Conclusion: Developing CDSSs based on diagnostic guidelines could be regarded as one of the possible approaches towards early and accurate diagnosis of Alzheimer's disease. Applying of computer-interpretable guideline (CIG) models such as GLIF, PROforma, Asbru, and EON can help to design CDSS with the capability of minimizing the burden of diagnostic problems with Alzheimer's disease

The effect of a well-designed computerized physician order entry on medication error reduction

Introduction: Paper-based prescription orders, commonly having numerous medication errors, can increase adverse drug events (ADEs) and threaten the patient’s safety. Computerized physician order entry (CPOE), as an appropriate alternative, can significantly reduce medication errors. This study aimed to investigate the effects of well-designed CPOE in reducing medication errors and ADEs. Method: Electronic databases including EBSCO Host, Web of Science, PubMed, SID, Google Scholar, Iranmedex, Irandoc were used to conduct the literature review. We reviewed all the papers published about CPOE and its impacts on medication errors from 1998 until 2015. Thus 56 articles were found. Considering the relevance of their title and abstract with the objectives of the study, and deleting repetitive cases, 32 articles were selected, among which 10 articles were directly related to the objectives of the study. Results:A number of studies indicate that CPOE can reduce the incidence of serious medication errors and ADEs. Nonetheless, there is evidence indicating that CPOE could negatively affect the patient’s health if the system is not well-designed. Conclusion: The replacement of conventional, paper-based prescription orders with well-designed CPOEs in hospitals could play a key role in minimizing medication errors and improving the patients’ safety. To this end, the CPOEs have to be designed according to recent standards and needs