BACKGROUND Because psychiatric disorders are risk factors for suicide, psychiatric consultation should be an essential element of suicide prevention among individuals with a high risk of suicide. The aim of the present study was to compare the characteristics of individuals who had or had not received psychiatric consultation before they attempted suicide in Japan. METHODS Clinical records we...

The Consultation Readiness Scale is designed to facilitate mental health and other forms of human services consultation. The scale is based on the assumption that consultee-consultant relationships vary in their "readiness" for consultation. A basic task for consultants is to assess the current readiness level and help move the relationship to a higher level. The Consultation Readiness Scale fa...

OBJECTIVE To identify factors that can enhance the use of e-consultation in primary care. We investigated the barriers, demands and motivations regarding e-consultation among patients with no e-consultation experience (non-users). METHODS We used an online survey to gather data. Via online banners on 26 different websites of patient organizations we recruited primary care patients with chroni...

The database model presented in this paper is suitable for application in which queries may require non-crisp references to certain attributes. The data item (attribute) values may be crisp or fuzzy. For instance, such adjectives as 'high' or 'normal' may be attribute values for the attribute blood pressure. A disease or a condition can be described by a number of symptoms which may be crisp al...

BACKGROUND Infectious disease specialist (IDS) consultation improves the outcome of Staphylococcus aureus bacteremia (SAB). Although telephone consultations constitute a substantial part of IDS consultations, their impact on treatment outcome lacks evaluation. METHODS We retrospectively followed 342 SAB episodes with 90-day follow-up, excluding 5 methicillin-resistant S. aureus SAB cases. Pat...

Electronic consultation (e-consultation) is an emerging tool that primary care clinicians can use to communicate with specialists about patients asynchronously--that is, at different times that are convenient for each physician. To conduct an e-consultation, clinicians use either a Web-based program or a shared electronic medical record. Early adopters of e-consultation describe positive experi...

This paper describes the design and implementation of cyber video consultation systems(CVCS) using hybrid P2P for video consultation between remote sites. The proposed system is based on client-server and P2P(Peer to Peer) architecture, where client-server is used for communication with the MCU(Multipoint Control Unit) and P2P is used for the cyber video consultation. The developed video consul...