Volume 3 Issue 3
Authors: Juha Puustj?rvi; Leena Puustj?rvi
Abstract: Patient-centered healthcare is an emerging healthcare model that optimizes the healthcare system to focus on patient experience and outcomes for better health and well-being. It requires that patients as well as physicians should have the ability to obtain and understand health information, and make appropriate health decisions. A problem is how such health information should be gathered from a variety of heterogeneous data sources, and how patient and physicians should access such information. Our argument is that the gathered information should not be presented as a collection of XML-documents but rather as an ontology. Further by storing the ontology in a cloud we can easily share patients’ health information among patient’s healthcare team. How this kind of solution can be implemented by exploiting healthcare standards, ontology languages and cloud technologies is the topic of this article.
Keywords: Personal Health Records; Patient-centered healthcare; Information Based Medicine; Information Therapy; HL7 RIM; Interoperability; Ontologies
Authors: D. Minh Nguyen; Hiroshi Deguchi; Manabu Ichikawa; Tomoya Saito; Shuhei Fujimoto
Abstract: The purpose of the research is to develop a framework to assess the risk of a highly contagious and mortal influenza-like illness infection to health care workers in a hospital under different scenarios of infection control. The method is to build an agent-based model for simulating infection of the virus in the hospital and use an open-source software to visualize a risk graph of infection. The simulation results show a high risk of infection among health care workers who directly take care of inpatients and the evidence of the risk is visualized in the form of graphs. The research contributes a novel risk assessment for hospital staff to prepare for an influenza pandemic in the future.
Keywords: Nosocomial Infection; Infection Control; Agent-Based Simulation; Risk Assessment
Authors: Lubna Mahmood; Ghazi Daradkeh
Abstract: Understanding the eating behaviors and attitudes during childhood is very important in terms of children’s health. Peers, parents and advertisements have the most important social influence on children’s eating habits that can affect them much on the consumption of processed foods which contain natural and artificial additives with some coloring agents such as erythrosine, Tartrazine, Monosodium glutamate, and Benzoate which are known as substances that added to food to preserve flavor or enhance its appearance and taste. It has been claimed that food additives and coloring agents have been related to behavior disorder which is known as Attention-deficit-hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), one of the most common chronic disorders during childhood which is affecting approximately 3% of the children between (4-8) years old. This disorder can be highly related to both environmental and familial disorder as well as many other modifiable risk factors, some studies showed that (ADHD) can be also related also to heavy metal and chemical exposures, lifestyle and psychosocial factors, prenatal substance exposures as well as nutritional factors. Disruptive behavior, inattention, hyperactivity, and impulsivity are common in (ADHD); academic difficulties are common as related problems. It can be difficult to define symptoms as well as to determine the exact normal levels of hyperactivity, inattention, and impulsivity end and the significant levels where interventions are required or should begin. Despite of all the studies done, a controversy about the negative effects of additive substances found in processed foods still exist and people are faced with a choice whether they can consume those products safely or not.
Keywords: ADHD; Food Additives; Artificial Food Colors; Hyperactivity; Child Behavior