Despite the key role of nutrition in health and the almost universal use of supplemental feeding in the ICU, there is a lack of high-quality evidence to guide clinical practice. Enteral nutrition is superior to TPN in almost all circumstances and most patients in the ICU can be fed successfully by this route. There is little evidence to support the use of special feeds and the role of immunonut...

Moral Hazard and Cash Benefits in Long-Term Home Care ∗ This paper tests empirically for ex-post moral hazard in a system based on demand-side subsidies. In the Netherlands, demand-side subsidies were introduced in 1996. Clients receive a cash benefit to purchase the type of home care (housework, personal care, support with mobility, organisational tasks or social support) they need from the ca...

Clinical decision support (CDS) systems can offer health care providers patient data that is intelligently filtered and presented in ways to enhance diagnosis and long-term health care management, both within and outside clinical spaces. Challenges to this information management include diagnostic error and inefficiencies from conflicting, incomplete, or suboptimal clinical systems [3] as well ...

The goal of Clinical Decision Support (CDS) is to help physicians find useful information from a collection of medical articles with respect to the given patient records, in order to take the best care of their patients. Most of the existing CDS methods do not sufficiently consider the semantic evidence, hence the potential in improving the performance in biomedical articles retrieval. This pap...

In the last years, remote support systems have become more common, also called e-health systems. It is clear the introduction of these systems have created a significant improvement regarding quality of life of several segments of our society such as elderly people, disabled people, patientsphysicians communications ... The changes of the health area, oriented towards greater equity in service ...

OBJECTIVE Decision support systems linked to administrative databases provide a unique opportunity to monitor adherence to guidelines and target disease management strategies towards patients not receiving guideline-based therapy. The objective of this study was to evaluate the discrepancy between actual asthma treatments prescribed by primary care physicians compared to those recommended by ev...

Most guidelines for clinical practice, and especially those for the construction of decision support tools, assume that the individual person (the patient) needs to be in possession of information of particular sorts and amount in order to qualify as having made an 'informed decision'. This often implicitly segues into the patient having made a 'good decision'. In person-centred health care, wh...

BACKGROUND Only 36% of sick Australians report being able to get an appointment on the day they need it, which is poor by international standards. This delay in care may impact on practice team morale, practice profitability and patient care. The Australian Primary Care Collaboratives Program aims to find better ways to provide primary healthcare services to patients through shared learning, pe...

The research into agent-based intelligent decision support systems is important to the medical industry because these systems can be used to improve the quality of healthcare in many ways. The areas these systems can be used in are diverse from the storage of medical records to the examination and evaluation of real-time data gathered from monitors. These systems are helpful to doctors and nurs...