Clinical evidence exist in modalities other than published clinical literature, such as clinical data ranging from patient clinical profiles to clinical trials; clinical experiences of eminent medical practitioners; and medical knowledge bases encapsulating knowledge about patient care, healthcare guidelines and protocols, clinical workflow and so on. We propose a technology-enriched strategy t...

For patients with mental health problems, various treatments exist. Before a treatment is assigned to a patient, a team of clinicians must decide which of the available treatments has the best chance of succeeding. This is a difficult decision to make, as the effectiveness of a treatment might depend on various factors, such as the patient’s diagnosis, background and social environment. Which f...

BACKGROUND Case management (CM) models based on experienced nurses are increasingly used to improve coordination and continuity of care for patients with complex health care needs. Anyway, little is known about the effects of hospital-based CM in cancer care. Aim. To analyse the effects of hospital-based CM on (i) GPs' evaluation of information from the hospital and collaboration with the hosp...

Scenarios are an intuitive way for software project stakeholders to capture requirements, describe test cases and evaluate software architectures. Typically, however, coming up with a complete scenario specification is difficult. Basic (or nominal) scenarios are easy to write down, but more complex or less common (non-nominal) scenarios are harder to elicit. In particular, there is currently no...

The present study examined the socio-demographic, clinical, cognitive, social behaviour and social network characteristics of the 97 patients in contact with the COSTAR programme--a mobile treatment and case management service for the long-term mentally ill in inner-city Baltimore. Compared with shorter-contact patients, those in contact for more than one year showed no change in symptoms, or i...

Semantic wikis enable a community of users to produce formalized knowledge readable and usable by machines. To take one step further, one can use a semantic wiki as a blackboard allowing humans and machines to interact in order to build knowledge that is useful for both humans and machines. In this paper, we present a case study of the use of a semantic wiki (Semantic Media Wiki) as a blackboar...

BACKGROUND Suicide attempts (SA) constitute a serious clinical problem. People who attempt suicide are at high risk of further repetition. However, no interventions have been shown to be effective in reducing repetition in this group of patients. METHODS/DESIGN Multicentre randomized controlled trial. We examine the effectiveness of "ALGOS algorithm": an intervention based in a decisional tre...

It is well known that on a line, a target point in unknown position can be found by walking a path at most 9 times as long as the distance from the start to the target point, in the worst case. This competitive factor of 9 is optimal. We investigate the case where the target is known to be within a fixed distance, r, of the start point, and determine the optimum competitive factor, C(r) < 9, th...

The Internet has become a significant transaction platform for the real estate industry. However, use of the Internet does not benefit homebuyers in terms of search time, flexibility, and intuitive results. While it does encourage buyers to search more intensively, and discover and visit more properties, it also wastes more time and energy. To improve the efficiency of real estate searches, we ...

The purpose of this research is to demonstrate the negative effects of emergency department frequent users and to introduce a utilization approach called case management, in order to help alleviate the growing costs of uncompensated physician care and emergency department overcrowding. The research is supported by case studies, personal interviews with case managers of Cape Fear Valley Health S...