Dynamic technological activities of analysis, evaluation, and synthesis can highlight complex relationships within integrated processes to target improvement and ultimately yield improved processes.... Show More

Dynamic technological activities of analysis, evaluation, and synthesis can highlight complex relationships within integrated processes to target improvement and ultimately yield improved processes. Likewise, the identification of existing process limitations, potential capabilities, and subsequent contextual understanding are contributing factors that yield measured improvement. Based on a 120-month longitudinal study of an academic medical center, this study investigates how integrated information systems and business analytics can improve perioperative efficiency and effectiveness across patient quality of care, stakeholder satisfaction, clinical operations, and financial cost effectiveness. This case study examines process management practices of balanced scorecard and dashboards to monitor and improve the perioperative process, aligned to overall hospital goals at strategic, tactical, and operational levels. The conclusion includes discussion of study implications and limitations.

Information security within healthcare is paramount and telemedicine applications present unique security challenges. Technology is giving rise to new and advanced telemedicine applications and... Show More

Information security within healthcare is paramount and telemedicine applications present unique security challenges. Technology is giving rise to new and advanced telemedicine applications and understanding the security threats to these applications is needed to ensure, among other things, the privacy of patient information. This paper proposes a threat table approach to assess security threats pertaining to telemedicine applications. The concept and its usefulness are illustrated using a case study. This case study focuses on the capture and representation of salient security threats in telemedicine. To analyze the security threats to an application, it presents a threat modeling framework utilizing a table driven approach. The study reveals that even in a highly controlled environment with static locations, the security risks posed by telemedicine applications are significant, and that using a threat table approach provides an easy-to-use and effective method for managing these threats.

Presented is the project called MAMICare, which is motivated by the alarming number of maternity and infant deaths in rural areas due mainly to a poor monitoring of pregnancy progress and lack of... Show More

Presented is the project called MAMICare, which is motivated by the alarming number of maternity and infant deaths in rural areas due mainly to a poor monitoring of pregnancy progress and lack of appropriate alerting mechanism in case of abnormal gestation evolution. This work proposes an information technology solution based on mobile devices, and health sensors such as ECG (electrocardiogram), stethoscope, pulse-oximeter, and blood-glucose meter to collect automatically relevant health data for a better monitoring of pregnant women. This article addresses the status of the maternity infant death problem especially in rural areas of Mexico. It reviews some applications of IT in health systems (known also as Electronic Health or simply e-Health) and discusses how these are related to the presented proposal and how they differ. The article presents the proposed solution and discuss the current status of the work.

The home healthcare initiative is aimed to reduce readmission costs, transportation costs, and hospital medical errors, and to improve post hospitalization healthcare quality, and enhance patient... Show More

The home healthcare initiative is aimed to reduce readmission costs, transportation costs, and hospital medical errors, and to improve post hospitalization healthcare quality, and enhance patient home independency. Today, it is almost unimaginable to consider this initiative without information technology. Home healthcare robots are one of such emerging technologies. Several robots have been developed to facilitate home healthcare such as remote presence robots (e.g., RP2) and Paro. Most previous research in this area has focused on technology and implementation issues of home healthcare robots, but ignored the factors that influence their adoption. To address the limitation, the current research applied and extended the UTAUT model to the home healthcare domain. The model was tested using survey questionnaire. The empirical results not only confirmed the effects of some constructs from the original UTAUT model but also identified perceived security as a new factor that directly affects usage intention of home healthcare robots. In addition, effort expectancy did not show a direct effect but an indirect effect through performance expectancy on usage intention. Several practical and theoretical implications are also discussed.