RESUMO
With widespread electronic health record (EHR) adoption and improvements in health information interoperability in the United States, troves of data are available for knowledge discovery. Several data sharing programs and tools have been developed to support research activities, including efforts funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH), EHR vendors, and other public- and private-sector entities. We surveyed 65 leading research institutions (77% response rate) about their use of and value derived from ten programs/tools, including NIH's Accrual to Clinical Trials, Epic Corporation's Cosmos, and the Observational Health Data Sciences and Informatics consortium. Most institutions participated in multiple programs/tools but reported relatively low usage (even when they participated, they frequently indicated that fewer than one individual/month benefitted from the platform to support research activities). Our findings suggest that investments in research data sharing have not yet achieved desired results.
Assuntos
Registros Eletrônicos de Saúde , Disseminação de Informação , Humanos , Estados Unidos , Software , Inquéritos e Questionários , National Institutes of Health (U.S.)RESUMO
The ability to understand and measure the complexity of clinical workflow provides hospital managers and researchers with the necessary knowledge to assess some of the most critical issues in healthcare. Given the protagonist role of workflow time studies on influencing decision makers, major efforts are being conducted to address existing methodological inconsistencies of the technique. Among major concerns, the lack of a standardized methodology to ensure the reliability of human observers stands as a priority. In this paper, we highlight the limitations of the current Inter-Observer Reliability Assessments, and propose a novel composite score to systematically conduct them. The composite score is composed of a) the overall agreement based on Kappa that evaluates the naming agreement on virtually created one-seconds tasks, providing a global assessment of the agreement over time, b) a naming agreement based on Kappa, requiring an observation pairing approach based on time-overlap, c) a duration agreement based on the concordance correlation coefficient, that provides means to evaluate the correlation concerning tasks duration, d) a timing agreement, based on descriptive statistics of the gaps between timestamps of same-task classes, and e) a sequence agreement based on the Needleman-Wunsch sequence alignment algorithm. We hereby provide a first step towards standardized reliability reporting in workflow time studies. This new composite IORA protocol is intended to empower workflow researchers with a standardized and comprehensive method for validating observers' reliability and, in turn, the validity of their data and results.
Assuntos
Variações Dependentes do Observador , Estudos de Tempo e Movimento , Fluxo de Trabalho , Humanos , Reprodutibilidade dos TestesRESUMO
Multiple choice questions play an important role in training and evaluating biomedical science students. However, the resource intensive nature of question generation limits their open availability, reducing their contribution to evaluation purposes mainly. Although applied-knowledge questions require a complex formulation process, the creation of concrete-knowledge questions (i.e., definitions, associations) could be assisted by the use of informatics methods. We envisioned a novel and simple algorithm that exploits validated knowledge repositories and generates concrete-knowledge questions by leveraging concepts' relationships. In this manuscript we present the development and validation of a prototype which successfully produced meaningful concrete-knowledge questions, opening new applications for existing knowledge repositories, potentially benefiting students of all biomedical sciences disciplines.
Assuntos
Algoritmos , Disciplinas das Ciências Biológicas/educação , Educação Médica , Avaliação Educacional/métodos , Vocabulário Controlado , Comportamento de Escolha , Humanos , Medical Subject HeadingsRESUMO
BACKGROUND: With the globalization of clinical trials, a growing emphasis has been placed on the standardization of the workflow in order to ensure the reproducibility and reliability of the overall trial. Despite the importance of workflow evaluation, to our knowledge no previous studies have attempted to adapt existing modeling languages to standardize the representation of clinical trials. Unified Modeling Language (UML) is a computational language that can be used to model operational workflow, and a UML profile can be developed to standardize UML models within a given domain. This paper's objective is to develop a UML profile to extend the UML Activity Diagram schema into the clinical trials domain, defining a standard representation for clinical trial workflow diagrams in UML. METHODS: Two Brazilian clinical trial sites in rheumatology and oncology were examined to model their workflow and collect time-motion data. UML modeling was conducted in Eclipse, and a UML profile was developed to incorporate information used in discrete event simulation software. RESULTS: Ethnographic observation revealed bottlenecks in workflow: these included tasks requiring full commitment of CRCs, transferring notes from paper to computers, deviations from standard operating procedures, and conflicts between different IT systems. Time-motion analysis revealed that nurses' activities took up the most time in the workflow and contained a high frequency of shorter duration activities. Administrative assistants performed more activities near the beginning and end of the workflow. Overall, clinical trial tasks had a greater frequency than clinic routines or other general activities. CONCLUSIONS: This paper describes a method for modeling clinical trial workflow in UML and standardizing these workflow diagrams through a UML profile. In the increasingly global environment of clinical trials, the standardization of workflow modeling is a necessary precursor to conducting a comparative analysis of international clinical trials workflows.