REQUEST DEMO
MENUCLOSE

 

REQUEST DEMO
Clinical Operations
Commercial Teams
Resources
Medical Education
About Us
Connect with us
Facebook-f Twitter Linkedin-in
Sign in

Author: Brian S McGowan, PhD

MANUSCRIPT: Ten challenges in improving quality in healthcare: lessons from the Health Foundation’s programme evaluations and relevant literature.

BACKGROUND:Formal evaluations of programmes are an important source of learning about the challenges faced in improving quality in healthcare and how they can be addressed. The authors aimed to integrate lessons from evaluations of the Health Foundations improvement programmes with relevant literature.METHODS:The authors analysed evaluation reports relating to five Health Foundation improvement programmes using a form of best fit synthesis, where a pre-existing framework was used for initial coding and then updated in response to the emerging analysis. A rapid narrative review of relevant literature was also undertaken.RESULTS:The authors identified ten key challenges: convincing people that there is a problem that is relevant to them; convincing them that the solution chosen is the right one; getting data collection and monitoring systems right; excess ambitions and projectness; organisational cultures, capacities and contexts; tribalism and lack of staff engagement; leadership; incentivising participation and hard edges; securing sustainability; and risk of unintended consequences. The authors identified a range of tactics that may be used to respond to these challenges.DISCUSSION:Securing improvement may be hard and slow and faces many challenges. Formal evaluations assist in recognising the nature of these challenges and help in addressing them.

via Ten challenges in improving quality in healthca… [BMJ Qual Saf. 2012] – PubMed – NCBI.

Continue Reading

ABSTRACT: Ordinary search engine users carrying out complex search tasks

Web search engines have become the dominant tools for finding information on the Internet. Owing to their popularity, users of all educational backgrounds and professions use them for a wide range of tasks, from simple look-up to rather complex information-seeking needs. This paper presents the results of a study that investigates the behavioural search characteristics of ordinary Web search engines users. The aim of the study was to investigate (1) what makes complex search tasks distinct from simple search tasks and whether it is possible to find simple measures for describing their complexity, and (2) whether successful searchers show different search behaviours than unsuccessful searchers and whether good searchers can be identified via simple measures. The study included 56 ordinary Web users who carried out a set of 12 search tasks using current commercial search engines. Their behaviour was logged with the Search-Logger tool. The results confirm that the behaviour in the case of complex search tasks has significantly different inherent characteristics than in the case of simple search tasks. This can be proven by using simple measures such as task time, number of queries, or number of browser tabs used. We also observed that it is difficult to distinguish successful from unsuccessful search behaviour simply by using these measures. The implications of our findings for search engine vendors are discussed. The results of this study with a sample of ordinary users are insofar unique as they are valid for a wider population while most studies in the field are usually done using convenience samples such as university students.

via Ordinary search engine users carrying out complex search tasks.

Continue Reading

MANUSCRIPT: Web 2.0 and Social Media in Education and Research

The use of technology has become ever more pervasive over the past decade, particularly in relation to information management and in facilitating communication, networking and collaboration. Improvements in communication and the accessibility of information have in  part been driven by the emergence of Web 2.0 technologies (also referred to as the read,  write web) that enable individuals not only to consume content but also to participate in the creation, sharing and remixing of information. Social media tools such as blogs, wikis, media  sharing and social networking sites have done away with the need for individuals to know  how to code and supported increased web accessibility and usability and ultimately growing  engagement with technology. These tools are also being adopted in education and  healthcare where they are supporting innovation and engagement with stakeholders. There  are, however, also some risks associated with using these new technologies that are  particularly pertinent in the healthcare setting. As a result access to these tools and  websites is often restricted and for those healthcare professionals in NHS settings and for  those involved in teaching and for students on NHS clinical attachments this can prove both  limiting and frustrating.
This paper  provides an overview of how Web 2.0 technologies are being used to support  teaching, learning and research in higher education highlights some of the risks associated with the use of social media in relation to  NHS staff and to propose that training could raise awareness of these risks as well  the potential benefits details common problems with NHS IT hardware and software faced by staff with a  role in higher education and concludes with a summary overview of common Web 2.0 and social media tools and  their potential benefits, risks and suggested  recommendations for access.

https://community.ja.net/system/files/515/NHF_Web2 0SoMEinEdResearch_May2013_final.pdf

Continue Reading

RESOURCE: Take Note | An exploration of note-taking in Harvard University Collections

Notes surround us. Whether in the form of lab notebooks, fieldnotes, sketchbooks, class notes, or surreptitious shorthand notes on plays and sermons, notetaking forms the basis of every scholarly discipline as well as of most literate people’s daily lives. Millennia after a potsherd from second-century Egypt, notes remain the lowest common denominator of information management. Like written responses to reading, manuscript records of speech cut across different cultures, different fields, and even different phases of life: students take notes on their professors’ lectures, which in turn form the product of professors’ notes on books. And from Aristotle’s philosophy to the works of 20th- century thinkers like Saussure and Wittgenstein, many of the foundational texts of Western culture have been transmitted or even generated by notes. Yet the definition of notes remains contentious: should we be speaking of “annotation” or “notetaking”? The former emphasizes something done to a text, the latter a more freestanding kind of writing; the former shades into commentary or metadata or marginalia, the latter into transcription of oral delivery.

via Take Note | An exploration of note-taking in Harvard University Collections.

Continue Reading

RESOURCE: Note-Taking Seminars at Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study – NYTimes.com

…the conference was more than a celebration of quirky marginalia and academic navel-gazing. The study of notes — whether pasted into commonplace books, inscribed on index cards or scribbled in textbooks — is part of a broader scholarly investigation into the history of reading, a field that has gained ground as the rise of digital technology has made the encounter between book and reader seem more fragile and ghostly than ever.

“The note is the record a historian has of past reading,” said Ann Blair, a professor of history at Harvard and one of the conference organizers. “What is reading, after all? Even if you look introspectively, it’s hard to really know what you’re taking away at any given time. But notes give us hope of getting close to an intellectual process.”

Not that note-taking was presumed to be an entirely wholesome activity. During the first panel, when asked if enthusiastic note-takers weren’t more like “compulsive hoarders,” Peter Burke, an emeritus professor of history at the University of Cambridge in England, recalled one of his own teachers warning that any student caught taking notes would be sent out of the classroom for inattention.

via Note-Taking Seminars at Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study – NYTimes.com.

Continue Reading

RESOURCE: Online class providers will grant credentials, for a fee

Providers of free online classes are experimenting with academic security measures that will enable students who successfully complete the college courses to obtain credentials, for a small fee, that convey some of the cachet of a premier university.The credentials, or certificates, won’t translate into course credit toward a degree — at least not at big-name schools — because questions persist about how much those schools are willing to grant students who don’t pay tuition, as well as about the potential for cheating online.

via Online class providers will grant credentials, for a fee.

Continue Reading

ABSTRACT: Temporal reasoning over clinical text: the state of the art

Objectives To provide an overview of the problem of temporal reasoning over clinical text and to summarize the state of the art in clinical natural language processing for this task.

Target audience This overview targets medical informatics researchers who are unfamiliar with the problems and applications of temporal reasoning over clinical text.

Scope We review the major applications of text-based temporal reasoning, describe the challenges for software systems handling temporal information in clinical text, and give an overview of the state of the art. Finally, we present some perspectives on future research directions that emerged during the recent community-wide challenge on text-based temporal reasoning in the clinical domain.

via Temporal reasoning over clinical text: the state of the art — Sun et al. — Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association.

Continue Reading

ABSTRACT: Patient–provider communication and trust in relation to use of an online patient portal among diabetes patients: The Diabetes and Aging Study — Lyles et al. — Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association

Patient–provider relationships influence diabetes care; less is known about their impact on online patient portal use. Diabetes patients rated provider communication and trust. In this study, we linked responses to electronic medical record data on being a registered portal user and using secure messaging (SM). We specified regression models to evaluate main effects on portal use, and subgroup analyses by race/ethnicity and age. 52% of subjects were registered users; among those, 36% used SM. Those reporting greater trust were more likely to be registered users (relative  risk (RR)=1.14) or SM users (RR=1.29). In subgroup analyses, increased trust was associated with being a registered user among white, Latino, and older patients, as well as SM use among white patients. Better communication ratings were also related to being a registered user among older patients. Since increased trust and communication were associated with portal use within subgroups, this suggests that patient-provider relationships encourage portal engagement.

via Patient–provider communication and trust in relation to use of an online patient portal among diabetes patients: The Diabetes and Aging Study — Lyles et al. — Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association.

Continue Reading

ABSTRACT: Communication Challenges for Chronic Metastatic Cancer in an Era of Novel Therapeutics

Advances in the production of novel therapies for cancer management are creating new challenges for the support of increasing numbers of persons surviving for extended periods with advanced disease. Despite incurable and life-limiting metastatic conditions, these patients are living longer with serious disease, pushing the boundaries of what science explains and clinicians can confidently interpret using available evidence. Here we report findings from an early subset of such individuals within a longitudinal qualitative cancer cohort study on clinician–patient communication across the cancer trajectory. In these findings, we contextualize experiential accounts of communication in a changing environment of the costs and uncertainties of personalized medicine, and examine the complex psychosocial circumstances of this rapidly growing patient population. Interpretation of these findings illustrates how emerging issues in cancer treatment influence the experience of these patients, their social and support networks, their cancer care specialists, and the multidisciplinary teams charged with coordinating their care.

via Communication Challenges for Chronic Metastatic Cancer in an Era of Novel Therapeutics.

Continue Reading

ABSTRACT: UUnderstanding the Etiology of Prescription Opioid Abuse Implications for Prevention and Treatment

Although studies on the initiation of substance abuse abound, the body of literature on prescription opioid abuse (POA) etiology is small. Little is known about why and how the onset of POA occurs, especially among high-risk populations. In this study we aimed to fill this important knowledge gap by exploring the POA initiation experiences of 90 prescription opioid abusers currently in treatment and their narrative accounts of the circumstances surrounding their POA onset. This research was conducted within a storyline framework, which operates on the premise that the path to drug abuse represents a biography or a process rather than a static condition. Audiotapes of in-depth interviews were transcribed, coded, and thematically analyzed. Analyses revealed the presence of four trajectories leading to POA. This study adds to the limited research on POA etiology by not only illuminating the psychosocial factors that contribute to POA onset, but also by situating initiation experiences within broader life processes. The study findings provide crucial insights to policymakers and interventionists in identifying who is at risk for POA, and more important, when and how to intervene most efficaciously.

via Understanding the Etiology of Prescription Opioid Abuse.

Continue Reading
Social
Facebook-f Twitter Linkedin-in
Recent News
Contact Us

300 E Main Street, Suite 101 Charlottesville, VA 22902

+1-434-260-1850

Email Us

About Us

ArcheMedX helps life sciences and healthcare organizations to better equip, evaluate, and predict team and clinician performance

ArcheMedX Privacy Policy