The task of determining patients' eligibility for clinical trials is knowledge and data intensive. In this paper, we present a model for the task of eligibility determination, and describe how a computer system can assist clinical researchers in performing that task. Qualitative and probabilistic approaches to computing and summarizing the eligibility status of potentially eligible patients are...

BACKGROUND With improvements in technology, electronic data capture (EDC) for large surveys is feasible. EDC offers benefits over traditional paper-based data collection, including more accurate data, greater completeness of data, and decreased data cleaning burden. METHODS The second Kenya AIDS Indicator Survey (KAIS 2012) was a population-based survey of persons aged 18 months to 64 years. ...

INTRODUCTION Health-related retrospective databases, in particular claims databases, continue to be an important data source for outcomes research. However, retrospective databases pose a series of methodological challenges, some of which are unique to this data source. METHODS In an effort to assist decision makers in evaluating the quality of published studies that use health-related retros...

BACKGROUND The HIV care in Ethiopia has reached 79% coverage. The timeliness of the care provided at the different levels in the course of the disease starting from knowing HIV positive status to ART initiation is not well known. This study intends to explore the timing of the care seeking, the care provision and associated factors. METHODS This is a longitudinal follow-up study at seven univ...

The purpose of this study was to determine the effectiveness of the Bayley Scales of Infant Development, Third Edition (Bayley-III) to track development and classify delays in low- and high-risk infants across the first two years of life. We assessed cognitive, language, and motor development in 24 low-risk full-term and 30 high-risk preterm infants via seven assessments performed between 3 and...

Optimizing access to HIV pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP), an evidence-based HIV prevention resource, requires expanding healthcare providers' adoption of PrEP into clinical practice. This qualitative study explored PrEP providers' firsthand experiences relative to six commonly-cited barriers to prescription-financial coverage, implementation logistics, eligibility determination, adherence conce...

Methods Between July and October 2010, 50 trained nurses intercepted and interviewed 1651 literate female clients ages 18 to 39 who were seeking various services at ADDOs in peri-urban and rural areas in two Tanzania regions. The nurse presented these women with a poster that summarized contraindications for COCs based on the World Health Organization criteria and asked them to determine their ...

To be effective, informatics tools for clinical trial protocols must inter-operate and share knowledge. We demonstrate a simple XML-based communication of eligibility criteria information between two independently-developed informatics tools. Using a shared DTD model of criteria, an authoring tool (developed within the Protégé environment) can send a list of eligibility criteria to a commercial...

BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE Acute treatments specifically for intracerebral hemorrhage (ICH) are being sought in randomized controlled trials. The treatment effect sizes in ongoing and future trials are likely to be small, necessitating large sample sizes. METHODS We searched online trial registries for randomized controlled trials investigating an acute treatment for ICH. For the trials whose eli...