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The importance of ensuring Russia’s national interests in forming an information space is based on the contemporary peculiarities of forming the information society. This study is devoted to the analysis of international legal acts regulating integration processes in the former Soviet Union in the course of forming a single information space in the transition from an information society to knowledge one.Authors provide an analysis of conditions in which the conceptual basis of forming the single information space the framework of international legal cooperation in the former Soviet Union in the field of information and informatization is grounded. The study includes an analysis of official data on CIS and EEU members’ cooperation as well as studies of Russian authors. Authors highlighted the importance of information communication technologies as instruments of transitioning from an information society to a knowledge society and emphasized the essential role of international legal cooperation experience for forming and providing access to the information space of knowledge in Russia.

Two decades after Health Services Research published a special issue on the subject (Hersh and Van Hook 1989), rural health care delivery remains a topical research area. Availability and accessibility of rural health care services are still major concerns, and rural health care institutions remain vulnerable (Hicks 1990; Ricketts and Savitz 1994; Gamm et al. 2002; Ricketts 2005;). Specifically, these institutions face a long-standing problem of acquiring sufficient professional expertise: rural America has 20 percent of the population but

Vascular access devices (VAD) represent high technology and are used frequently in infant, pediatric, adult, and geriatric populations for vascular infusion of chemotherapy, immunotherapy, blood products, biologic response modifiers, nutrition support, analgesics, ionotropics, antibiotics, and other medications, as well as for extraction of pleural fluid from patients with chronic effusions and for treatment with dialysis. Increasingly, these devices are migrating to the home setting as they are used in chronic care and as insurance requirements reduce access to prolonged hospital stays. Surveillance of infections in high risk patients such as those with cancer, cardiac conditions, or post-trauma convalescence is essential to avoid adverse events and to offer early treatment. VAD site and blood stream infections are common VAD complications, occurring in up to 50% of home care patients, usually during days 4–25 after hospital discharge. Our literature search for reports of remote home monitoring for support of VAD patients and their caregivers found none. The use of videoconferencing technology to assess VAD sites in the post-discharge environment would significantly enhance patient safety, facilitate continuity of care, and meet the Communicable Disease Center's stated need for the development of surveillance systems to monitor infections in home care settings. Low-cost Internet- or telephone-based videoconferencing technology that could be deployed easily and used during risk periods would be highly beneficial to patients and increase the cost-effective use of homecare nursing personnel. We report criteria-based protocols for remote assessment of VAD status, for monitoring VAD care procedures employed in the home, and for conducting VAD-care teaching of patients and their caregivers. In addition, we report an initial evaluation of the ability to assess VAD status using low-end videoconferencing technologies.

A three-stage study to develop and test an unobtrusive room sensor unit and subject data management system to discover correlation between sensor-based time-series measurements of sleep quality and clinical assessments of combat veterans suffering from Post-traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) and mild Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI), is described. Experiments and results for testing sensitivity and robustness of the sensor unit and data management protocol are provided. The current sensitivity of remote vital sign monitoring system is below 20% and 10% for respiration and heart rates, respectively.

In chapter nine, the authors review a model of the conservation of information (COI) applied to organizations. Following this review, the chapter includes a brief review of the mathematics in support of this model and its implications for the development of theory. Then the model is applied to a review of the status of telemedicine and e-health in Georgia, which the authors had begun to study last year. After the reviews, they discuss future steps and draw conclusions about the model and its benefit to organizational attention and decision-making.

The authors review telemedicine and e-health from an organizational perspective. To evaluate their effectiveness, they review organizational and system theory along with field and laboratory results. Theory of the conservation of information (COI) provides the means to study tradeoffs across space and over time as telemedicine and e-health management make operational decisions for virtual communities users. With the authors’ three case studies, they evaluate COI for telemedicine and e-health networks operating in the state of Georgia. After analyzing the case studies with COI, the authors close with a review of future trends that includes an interaction rate equation, an agent-based model (ABM) using natural selection (machine learning), and a Monte Carlo simulation of return on investments (ROI).

We review our research with military Medical Department Research Centers (MDRC; a pseudonym).In 2006, we first proposed an electronic data system with metrics to better measure performance for the MDRCs. The data management system evolved into an electronic system for an Institutional Review Board (e-IRB) at one site. We foresaw that an e-IRB could provide the metrics to better monitor MDRC practices. Now that the eIRB is operational, metrics can measure how well the present mission of the MDRCs is being met across its system (improved patient care, increased scientific knowledge, and improved graduate student education); and, how well its vision is achieved (transforming the present mission of MDRCs to prepare for future missions).