Browsing by Subject "Health information technology"

Now showing 1 - 3 of 3
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    Enhancing biomedical terminologies to include behavioral health: a prerequisite to improving the quality of healthcare
    (2013-05) Svensson, Piper Allyn
    Developing high quality information systems capable of supporting research and clinical care in behavioral health requires the existence of robust clinical terminologies and information models. These terminologies and information models must be capable of representing the same breadth and depth of constructs in the psychological domain that we demand of terminologies in the medical domain. Focusing specifically on psychological assessment instruments and their role in healthcare, we present three distinct studies assessing the extent to which existing healthcare terminologies can be used to capture, code, aggregate, and retrieve information in this domain. We begin with the premise that representation of psychological assessments instruments and instrument-related data must be addressed early in the terminology enhancement process. Psychometric instruments are, by definition, the foundation upon which all empirical knowledge in this domain is based. These instruments play a central role in shaping current understanding of both clinically relevant phenomena and specific mental health conditions. Moreover, results obtained using instruments are the grounds upon which clinical practice in this domain is designated as "evidence based". The results of the each of the three studies demonstrate significant gaps in terminologies relative to behavioral health; gaps that hamper the application of health information technology (HIT) in this domain and undermine efforts to improve the quality of healthcare. We discuss the details and implications of these findings and recommend a more aggressive, interdisciplinary effort to enhance healthcare terminologies to include behavioral health.
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    Insights from a user-centered approach to computerized guidelines for chronic disease
    (2011-06) Shaten, Barbara Jessica
    For more than two decades, the medical informatics community has worked towards representing evidence-based guidelines in computer code, intended to be executed at the point of care. The purpose is to close the gap between evidence of best medical practices and the care that patients receive. Most informatics work has taken a "guideline-centric" approach, focusing primarily on the guidelines rather than the physicians who are the intended users. The HIT Asthma project took a "user-centric" approach towards developing, implementing and evaluating the effects of a computerized decision support (CDS) tool for ambulatory asthma care. The user-centricity yielded findings that questioned the ability of guidelines to support medical work, raised ethical concerns, and challenged the epistemic foundations of the evidence which the guidelines are intended to impart. The approach also demonstrated how CDS tools for chronic disease could become prototypical technologies to support a "Healthcare System that Learns", a vision promulgated by the Institute of Medicine Roundtable on Evidence-Based Medicine.
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    ITS and Transportation Safety: EMS System Data Integration to Improve Traffic Crash Emergency Response and Treatment - Phase III Report
    (Intelligent Transportation Systems Institute, Center for Transportation Studies, 2011-10) Schooley, Benjamin; Horan, Thomas A.; Hilton, Brian
    The transportation safety and Emergency Medical Services (EMS) literature has called for the development of better information system tools to support EMS to aid in reducing the human impact of medical emergencies. Building upon previous research by the researchers, this project seeks to advance a prototype of a mobile and web-based information service, known as CrashHelp, designed for use by various emergency medical practitioners involved in the end-to-end continuum of emergency patient care. The broad objective in this report was to examine the potential to provide – through a geographic information system (GIS)-based visual and interactive platform -- an easy to use analytical tool that can provide a holistic view of crash information (such as distance, age, severity of crash) that can better serve practitioners and agencies in planning for and responding to traffic crashes. The specific research objectives were to: (1) collect and examine information regarding the potential for using the CrashHelp system in the state of Idaho as a case-study; (2) identify and develop aggregate performance metrics for end-to-end EMS responses to automobile crashes for inclusion in CrashHelp; and (3) expand the CrashHelp prototype to include aggregate level clinical and operational performance metrics that would provide valuable decision-level information for planners and practitioners.