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We describe the background, features and functions of a custom application for the acquisition, live presentation, and convenient recording of ballistocardiography data acquired by external accelerometric sensors.

Effectiveness is a key element of high quality health services. The aim of this pilot study was to explore the potential of electronic health records (EHR) as an information source for assessing the effectiveness of nursing care by investigating the appearance of nursing processes in the documentation of care. Deductive and inductive content analysis were used in a manual annotation of ten patients’ EHRs. The analysis resulted in the identification of 229 documented nursing processes. The results indicate that EHRs can be used in decision support systems for assessing effectiveness of nursing care, however, future work is needed to verify these findings in a larger data set and extend to other dimensions related to care quality.

17 RCTs for 15 digital health applications (DiGA) permanently listed in the state-regulated register were analyzed descriptively for methodological study aspects relevant to evidence analysis. The analysis revealed that several underlying studies had limitations, at least worthy of discussion, in terms of their power concerning sample size, intervention and control group specifications, drop-out rates, and blinding.

Google Play and Apple’s App Store dominate the mobile health app market. We analyzed the metadata and descriptive texts of apps in the medical category using semi-automated retrospective app store analysis (SARASA) and compared the store offerings in terms of their number, descriptive texts, user ratings, medical device status, diseases, and conditions (both keyword-based). Relatively speaking, the store listings for the selected items were comparable.

In this essay we will discuss capacity development in health informatics research and application, which to us is among the major contributions of Professor John Mantas scholarship. Specifically, driven by the inspiration of his scholarship we will elaborate on advancing new applications areas, additional actors and geographical uptake of health informatics and eHealth solutions over time. We will illustrate capacity development in health informatics and address challenges that systematically foster digital health literacy, engagement and empowerment, and building health informatics capacities regionally, in Europe and globally.

We evaluate the performance of multiple text classification methods used to automate the screening of article abstracts in terms of their relevance to a topic of interest. The aim is to develop a system that can be first trained on a set of manually screened article abstracts before using it to identify additional articles on the same topic. Here the focus is on articles related to the topic “artificial intelligence in nursing”. Eight text classification methods are tested, as well as two simple ensemble systems. The results indicate that it is feasible to use text classification technology to support the manual screening process of article abstracts when conducting a literature review. The best results are achieved by an ensemble system, which achieves a F1-score of 0.41, with a sensitivity of 0.54 and a specificity of 0.96. Future work directions are discussed.

The Medical Product Information found in most medication boxes offer a wealth of information, including terms of active ingredients, excipients, indications, dosage, route of administration, risks, and safety information. Digital health services that help patients, their care givers, and health professionals to manage medication, can be improved with tailored information based on user profile, the patient’s Electronic Health Record (EHR) summary, and Medicinal Product Information. The electronic Product information (ePI) comprises the summary of product characteristics, package leaflet, and product label. The European Medicines Agency released in 2021 the first version of the EU proof-of-concept ePI standard based on HL7 FHIR. The Gravitate-Health project uses this common standard as a springboard to implement a federated open-source platform and services that helps advance access, understanding, and adherence by providing trusted medicinal information in an interoperable and scalable way. In this paper, we present the agile technical approach and co-creation process to design, test, and progressively mature interoperability working with the HL7 Vulcan Accelerator and FHIR connectathons.

Funding Information: Acknowledgements: This work was supported by the Academy of Finland (grants 315376, 336033, 315896), Business Finland (grant 884/31/2018), and EU H2020 (grant 101016775). We thank Jari Björne for helping with fine-tuning the BERT model. Publisher Copyright: © 2022 European Federation for Medical Informatics (EFMI) and IOS Press. | openaire: EC/H2020/101016775/EU//INTERVENE In health sciences, high-quality text embeddings may augment qualitative data analysis of large amounts of text by enabling, e.g., searching and clustering of health information. This study aimed to evaluate three different sentence-level embedding methods in clustering sentences in nursing narratives from individual patients' hospital care episodes. Two of these embeddings are generated from language models based on the BERT framework, and the third on the Sent2Vec method. These embedding methods were used to cluster sentences from 20 patient care episodes and the results were manually evaluated. Findings suggest that the best clusters were produced by the embeddings from a BERT model fine-tuned for the proxy task of predicting subject headings for nursing text.

In health sciences, high-quality text embeddings may augment qualitative data analysis of large amounts of text by enabling, e.g., searching and clustering of health information. This study aimed to evaluate three different sentence-level embedding methods in clustering sentences in nursing narratives from individual patients’ hospital care episodes. Two of these embeddings are generated from language models based on the BERT framework, and the third on the Sent2Vec method. These embedding methods were used to cluster sentences from 20 patient care episodes and the results were manually evaluated. Findings suggest that the best clusters were produced by the embeddings from a BERT model fine-tuned for the proxy task of predicting subject headings for nursing text.

The aim of the study was to explore emergency department transfer delays and to assess the potential of using a semantic clustering approach to augment the content analysis of transfer delay data. Data were collected over a period of 5 months from two hospitals. A set of (unique) phrases describing reasons for transfer delays (n=333) were clustered using the k-means with 1) cluster centroids initiated in an unsupervised fashion and 2) a semi-supervised version where the cluster centroids were initiated with keywords. The unsupervised algorithm clustered 77 % and the semi-supervised 86 % of the phrases to suitable clusters. We chose the better performing approach to augment our content analysis. Three main categories for transfer delays were found as a result. These included 1) insufficient staffing resources, 2) transportation and bed issues, and 3) patient and care related reasons. The findings inform the audit of organisational processes, accuracy of staffing and workflow to reduce transfer delays. Future research should explore implications of semantic clustering approaches to other narrative data sets in health service research.

Treatment of total ruptures of adductor longus is challenging in professional sports. Time for return to pre-injury level as well as re-injury rates are of concern and surgical and conservative treatment approaches are debated; yet no consensus approach described for professional athletes. We present a case of a professional soccer player who experienced a rupture in his left adductor longus proximal tendon during a game and was treated conservatively. This case was followed-up during clinical assessment, imaging and strength testing until and after return to play. Primary outcome measure was the return to standard play condition at his pre-injury level without any functional deficits, measured by isokinetic testing. Second outcome measure was the recurrence. No recurrence was observed during the first year of follow-up. Total ruptures are very challenging for both the physician and the player to make a quick decision due to minimal or lack of pain. Functional outcomes are almost identical although operative treatments need longer time to return to play. This case report adds another example to the literature of a successful return to play after non-operative treatment of adductor longus rupture at elite level soccer.

In higher education, programs in specialization in Health Informatics, Medical Informatics, Health Engineering are continuously growing. In this research, almost 1800 universities and colleges were checked in order to find related educational programs at all academic levels. Approximately 1000 academic leading degree programs in those domains have already been identified. The detailed records of the related educational programs will help to understand the current educational needs and priorities. Although, the growth of the related educational programs is not the same in each country.

eHealth can improve healthcare worldwide, and scientific research should provide evidence on the efficacy, safety and added value of such interventions. For successful implementation of eHealth interventions into clinical practice, barriers need to be anticipated. We identified seven barriers by interviewing health professionals in the Dutch healthcare system. These barriers covered three topics: financing, human factors and organizational factors. This paper discusses their potential impact on eHealth uptake. Bridging the gap between studies to assess effective eHealth interventions and their value-based implementation in healthcare is much needed.

Patient access to electronic health records (EHRs) is associated with improved efficiency, self-management, and patient engagement. However, the EHR contains medical language that can be difficult to comprehend by patients. In Dutch hospitals, the Diagnosethesaurus (DT) is used as an interface terminology to register diagnoses, but it does not contain patient-friendly terms. Fortunately, the DT is partly mapped to SNOMED CT and there is a proportionately small set of patient-friendly terms available in the Dutch SNOMED CT release. The purpose of this study was, therefore, to investigate if SNOMED CT can be used to generate clarifications of diagnoses for patients. Only 1.2% of the DT diagnoses that were already mapped to SNOMED CT had patient-friendly synonyms that were different from the diagnoses descriptions. However, by generalizing diagnoses to SNOMED CT concepts with patient-friendly terms, this number could be increased to 71%. In conclusion, we showed that a high percentage of diagnoses could be clarified to at least some extent with the relatively small set of patient-friendly terms. Future research will involve the further optimization of the clarifications, and evaluation with clinicians and patients.

The Education Working Group of IMIA NI present this thought provoking panel where the changing and challenging role of nursing will be explored within the information intensive eHealth arena. The session will be of interest to any nurse as the discussion will be driven by the objective of trying to understand how best to prepare nurses to be actively engaged in information and communication technology (ICT) developments that enhance care assessment, delivery, evaluation and audit. As a balance, the discussion will consider the increasing emergence of ‘nursing by numbers’ where risk assessment tools are used in an automatic way leaving little room for individual evidenced based care.

Objective: Everyday challenges to "live well" with a rare disorder, anorectal anomaly, was the starting point to design a social-software environment, called RareICT, to help patients and family members in their everyday, additional un-paid work. Participants: Persons with the rare disorder, family members and health providers were recruited to elaborate challenges to daily living given this condition. Methods: An exploratory study was designed, and we set up a series of participatory design workshops to explore challenges to everyday living with a rare medical condition. Results: Anorectal anomaly has few visible outward signs, and is often surrounded with secrecies. Findings shed light on efforts to maintain physical functioning, psychosocial and emotional wellbeing. For an affected person to "live well" modifications to everyday routines, along with management work, support work and planning work are required. Accumulating practical strategies, everyday experiences and knowledge, along with virtual access to peers may augment such health maintenance work if integrity, accountability and trust, confidentiality and privacy are maintained. Conclusion: A social-software environment was set up to offer co-evolving content and augment health-related decision-making at home. Toevaluate the project will focus on interest in maintaining participation determined and how users benefit from services such as RareICT.

Article dicsussing the Metadata Education and Research Information Commons (MERIC), a collaborative teaching and research initiative.

In this paper we report on findings related to treatment of patient consent in various circumstances and geographic domains; explore transfer of health data between custodians and geo-political entities; and emphasize importance of educating general public about issues related to handling health data. A specific set of questions about consent/legislation and related issues in the Canada, the USA and the EU are addressed in an attempt to answer them systematically. This comparison identifies similarities and differences along a set of dimensions.