Catálogo de publicaciones - libros

There are many organized units involved to perform an emergency rescue mission: dispatch center, mobile rescue units and emergency departments (ED) in hospitals. Communication among them is often not fully automated, and then personnel need to cope with unnecessary work. That of course takes time in cases of urgent interventions, while time is one of the most important factors for patient survival. There are several processes in which better performance could be established. Improvement can be made by reducing communication obstacles between actors in processes and among three different information systems involved: hospital information system (HIS) in emergency department, computer aided dispatch (CAD) and records management system (RMS) used by mobile units.

This paper present methods of data presentations that enable performance and activity monitoring of a health care system. The methods enable visual discovery of typical and atypical patterns, anomalies and outliers in the data. The methods were successfully implemented in a monitoring system developed for monitoring the primary healthcare system of Slovenia, to be used by the national Ministry of Health.

Medical and nursing simulations at the Faculty of Health Sciences University of Maribor provide the skills to nursing and medical students that will improve clinical practice. Simulations is thus becoming an essential tool in improving quality of patient care and safety. Simulations enable teaching, learning, evaluation and clinical research.

The Higher Education in Clinical Engineering (HECE) of the University of Trieste constituted in 2005 the Open Three Consortium (O3), an innovative open-source project dealing with the multi-centric integration of hospitals, RHIOs and citizen (care at home and on the move, and ambient assisted living), based on the about 60 HECE bilateral cooperation Agreements with Hospitals, Medical Research Centers, Healthcare Enterprises, Industrial Enterprises and Governmental Agencies and on the International Networks ABIC-BME (Adriatic Balcanic Ionian Cooperation on Biomedical Engineering) and ALADIN (Alpe Adria Initiative Universities’ Network). Some months ago, the collaboration with multiple open-source solutions has been extended, starting an international cooperation with the open-source based company Sequence Managers Software, Raleigh, NC, United States. The O3 Consortium proposes e-inclusive citizen-centric solutions to cover the above reported three main aspects of the future of e-health in Europe with open-source strategies joined to full-service maintenance and management models.

Within the Open Three Consortium (O3) an open source radiological reporting workstation, called O3- RWS, has been studied, developed and experimented in the routine of European and US hospitals. The O3 Consortium is an international open-source project constituted in 2005 by Higher Education in Clinical Engineering (HECE) of the University of Trieste; it deals with the multi-centric integration of hospitals, RHIOs and citizen (care at home and on the move, and ambient assisted living). O3-RWS has been studied and developed with the goal to give a solution for the needs of the physician, who wants to have an easy-to-use, light and complete solution for the radiology reporting and report creation. O3-RWS, a very versatile platform-independent radiology workstation, providing user authentication and being easy to use also for private users, is able to retrieve, visualize and manage medical images; in an universal version, it is going to be able to deal with vital signs like ECG, hemodynamical and pneumological data.

In this paper some results of modeling web-based clinical trial electronic data collection process are presented. Clinical trial data collection is usually a paper-based process. Here we propose a new process of electronic data collection adjusted for the utilization of the web-based technology. Two models that we present here are the basis for the development of the electronic data collection software to support clinical trials. The first one defines use cases of the actors using the system. The second one is a model of the structure of the electronic Case Report Form (eCRF) document. Descriptions of these two models at a high level of abstraction are presented using the standard UML (Unified Modeling Language) version 2.0.

With the development of e-learning and its ability to provide rich animated content rapidly to a wide audience, new methods for teaching have evolved. E-learning tools allow building of learner-focused structured courses. The authors affords in this paper the feasibility study of a Webbased e-learning course in the academic degree of Laurea for Biomedical Laboratory Technicians (LBLT). Topic and basic aspects and essential requirements have been identified covering (1) the simplicity of the needed methodology to exchange didactic material and (2) the need of a simple and fast architecture for digital tele-pathology to exchange pathologic and /or cytological data. The last is a core aspect for the amount of data to be exchanged and the complexity of the applications even higher that other tele-imaging methodologies such as tele-radiology and tele-echocardiography. For these reasons a course of LBLT could represent thus an interesting bench test for the e-learning.

Management is one of the most complex subjects in the field of of health care systems. Indeed, the performance of an hospital is affected by plenty of factors, related to technology, organization and estate. Health centres have often been monitoring their operations by analyzing financial and operational reports provided, but organizational and technological aspects are sometimes pushed to the background. This paper describes a decision support system designed for hospital administrators to increase their analysis and management effectiveness.. Taking as a starting point recent researches, this study proposes a set of performance indicators, balancing organizational, structural and technological aspects, to be used together with widely adopted clinical indicators.

The introduction of new services into a complex system, as it is the Health System, is not an easy challenge. Health Technology Assessment could support decision makers and drive decision making regarding the introduction of new health services. This paper describes an analysis to evaluate those clinical and patient’s needs that could be satisfied by integration of Ambulatory Follow-up and Home Monitoring. Then a cost-analysis on the ambulatory follow-up and a preliminary cost-estimation on Web Service are performed in order to assess the economical impact of these services on the follow-up.

This article describes a multi-scale methodology for Health Technology Assessment. Multi-scale means that this method focuses the attention on the needs to be satisfied taken as a whole, by categories and one by one. For this reason a graphic representation has been used to identify the strengths of every technology to be compared. Than an objective function has been established in order to individuate the technology that better fill the needs as whole and by category. In order to establish a scale of satisfaction, it was necessary to define an algorithm that could distinguish parameters in objectivequantitative and subjective-qualitative. These last items have been quantified by auditing an un-polarized sample of experts trough questionnaires. Finally the chosen method was applied to neurosurgery, especially to spine surgery. Two different surgical techniques have been evaluated for different pathologies, each method applying different biocompatible elements: the traditional treatment, which employs rigid fixers (Cage and Titanium bars) and a new procedure, which employs elastic fixers with shape memory (Somafix and Nitinol bars).