Suggesting a framework for preparedness against the pandemic outbreak based on medical informatics solutions: a thematic analysis

Conceptual framework for establishing twins prevention and continuous health promotion programme: a qualitative study

BACKGROUND

Twin registries and cohorts face numerous challenges, including significant resource allocation, twins' recruitment and retention. This study aimed to assess expert feedback on a proposed pragmatic idea for launching a continuous health promotion and prevention programme (HPPP) to establish and maintain twin cohorts.

DESIGN

A qualitative study incorporating an inductive thematic analysis.

SETTING

Tehran University of Medical Sciences.

PARTICIPANTS

Researchers with expertise in twin studies participated in our study.

ANALYSIS AND DESIGN

Expert opinions were gathered through focus group discussions (FGDs). Thematic analysis was employed to analyse the findings and develop a model for designing a comprehensive, long-term health promotion programme using ATLAS.ti software. Additionally, a standardised framework was developed to represent the conceptual model of the twin HPPP.

RESULTS

Eight FGDs were conducted, involving 16 experts. Thematic analysis identified eight themes and seven subthemes that encompassed the critical aspects of a continuous monitoring programme for twin health. Based on these identified themes, a conceptual framework was developed for the implementation of an HPPP tailored for twins.

CONCLUSION

This study presented the initial endeavour to establish a comprehensive and practical solution in the form of a continuous HPPP designed to tackle the obstacles of twins' cohorts.

Investigating the implementation of telehealth and digital technologies during public health crisis: A qualitative review

Public health crises such as the Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic across the world overstrained the health care system. Accordingly, telehealth and digital technologies were implemented. Telehealth and digital technologies refer to the provision of health care at a distance using electronic means for diagnosis, evaluation, treatment, monitoring, and education of patients. This approach, while extremely useful, can be challenging for both patients and physicians, mainly as this is a new mode of health care to health practitioners and patients. Intrinsically, when managing the massive disruption to the routine of patient health care workflow, it is important to understand the important factors associated with an accelerated introduction of telehealth and digital technologies for the effective and safe continuation of healthcare during a public health crisis. Accordingly, this current study performed a qualitative review analysis of 40 scientific sources from 2019 to 2022. Findings present health practitioners that implemented telehealth and digital technologies during the public health emergency. Additionally, findings from this study presents a workflow approach for telehealth visit cycle and also discusses the current telehealth and virtual applications being implemented during public health crisis. This study provides implications to support health care managers and policymakers of health centres to be virtually informed regarding digital applications being implemented by patients and health practitioners on how to implement an effective telehealth system during public health crises.

Rapid implementation of telepharmacy service to improve patient-centric care and multidisciplinary collaboration across hospitals in a COVID era: A cross-sectional qualitative study

Background and Aim

The COVID‐19 pandemic forced healthcare systems to apply new technology‐based solutions. The main objective of our study was to describe the conceptual model for rapid implementation of telepharmacy service and the main steps that should be considered.

Method

In response to a limited number of on‐site clinical pharmacy specialists and a lack of technology infrastructure, a cross‐sectional telepharmacy program was established to support major teaching hospitals. A store and forward model of teleconsultation was employed using WhatsApp messenger to cover various aspects of multidisciplinary collaboration in COVID‐19 management. All identifiable personal information was removed from all exchanged messages of collaborative consultations. The thematic analysis of consultations was performed to extract the main themes and subthemes that should be considered for designing future telepharmacy systems.

Results

Through telepharmacy service, 600 intensive care unit teleconsultations for COVID‐19 cases were conducted in the residence center and nonresidence centers. In total, 1200 messages were exchanged between specialists in 3 months. The average time taken to respond to a message was 1.30 h. Thematic analysis revealed four main concepts and 15 subconcepts that should be considered in telepharmacy consultations for COVID‐19 management. Based on the extracted themes, a conceptual model for developing a telepharmacy program was devised.

Conclusion

The results showed that by utilizing telehealth, clinical pharmacists could cover critically ill patients who need pharmacotherapy counseling through interdisciplinary collaboration. Moreover, the main features of our service that are represented through this survey can be employed by other researchers for developing telepharmacy services.

Telemedicine in lung transplant to improve patient-centered care: A systematic review

OBJECTIVES

Long-term care combined with complex follow-up processes is among the essential needs of lung transplantation. Therefore, Telemedicine-based strategies can provide an effective approach for both patients and clinicians by applying remote patient monitoring. Hence, the main objective of this study was to investigate Telemedicine and telehealth usage in lung transplantation.

METHOD

A systematic review was conducted in four databases using keywords. Eligible studies were all English papers that developed Telemedicine-based programs to enhance patient care in lung organ transplantation. The interventions were analyzed analysis to determine the main descriptive areas. The quality of the included articles was evaluated using Mixed Methods Appraisal Tool (MMAT) tool by two authors.

RESULTS

Of the 261 retrieved articles, 27 met our inclusion criteria. Of these, 22 studies were devoted to the post-transplantation phase. All articles were published from 2002 to 2021 and the trend of publications has increased in recent years. Most of the studies were conducted in the United States and Canada. All eligible studies can be categorized into five types of Telemedicine interventions, 15 (55.56%) articles devoted to Telemonitoring, four (14.81%) for Teleconsultation, four (14.81%) articles for Telerehabilitation, three (11.11%) articles for Telespirometery, and one (3.70%) article were done regarding Tele-education.

CONCLUSION

This integrated review provides researchers with a new understanding of Telemedicine-based care solutions. Findings show that remote patient care in lung transplantation includes various aspects, especially self-care improvement.

A New Model of Multiple Intelligence for Teaching English Informatics in the IoT Scenario

This paper presents an in-depth study on the new mode of intelligent multidistance teaching of English with the help of virtual scenes of the Internet of Things. The virtual simulation technology is integrated into the traditional IoT teaching, and the professional education of IoT application technology is tapped; from the analysis of the current situation of IoT skills teaching and the feasibility of carrying out virtual simulation teaching, the “four-driven” design principle is proposed, and the teaching design is combined with the virtual simulation technology teaching, and the case design of the skill-based virtual simulation technology teaching of experience, demonstration, interaction, and assessment in the virtual environment is given. This paper presents the case design of virtual simulation teaching in a virtual environment with experience, demonstration, interaction, and assessment, and the multidimensional effect evaluation of IoT skills teaching and researches the application of virtual simulation to IoT skills teaching through the above four aspects. In this paper, a framework for distributed collaborative computing is built using an asynchronous message queue MQ, which enables multiple nodes to serve a task through task splitting. The DeepCluster module can effectively cluster the time series by deep representation learning and obtain the typical variation of time series patterns. In the task offloading module of the framework, a task offloading decision algorithm based on a value-constrained multi 0–1 backpacking model is designed to minimize task processing latency with an optimal offloading solution. The system test results show that the proposed distributed computing framework and offloading decision algorithm can significantly reduce the processing latency of large tasks.

Applied techniques for putting pre-visit planning in clinical practice to empower patient-centered care in the pandemic era: a systematic review and framework suggestion

Background

One of the main elements of patient-centered care is an enhancement of patient preparedness. Thus, pre-visit planning assessment tools was emerged to prepare and involve patients in their treatment process.

Objective

The main objective of this article was to review the applied tools and techniques for consideration of putting pre-visit planning into practice.

Methods

Web of Science, Scopus, IEEE, and PubMed databases were searched using keywords from January 2001 to November 2020. The review was completed according to the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses checklist. Then, qualitative analysis was done to suggest an appropriate framework by mapping the main concepts.

Results

Out of 385 citations were retrieved in initial database searches, 49 studies from ten countries were included. Applied pre-visit techniques can be classified into eight categories. Our results showed that almost 81% of studies were related to procedures that were done between each visit, while 42% of articles were related to before visits. Accordingly, the main approach of included articles was patient preparedness. While 38 studies reported this approach is effective, three studies reported the effectiveness of such tools as moderate, only two articles believed it had a low effect on improving patient-centered care.

Conclusion

This survey summarized the characteristics of published studies on pre-visit planning in the proposed framework. This approach could enhance the quality of patient care alongside enhancement patient-provider communication. However, such an approach can also be helpful to control pandemic diseases by reducing unnecessary referrals.

Supplementary Information

The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1186/s12913-021-06456-7.

Using data mining techniques to fight and control epidemics: A scoping review

The main objective of this survey is to study the published articles to determine the most favorite data mining methods and gap of knowledge. Since the threat of pandemics has raised concerns for public health, data mining techniques were applied by researchers to reveal the hidden knowledge. Web of Science, Scopus, and PubMed databases were selected for systematic searches. Then, all of the retrieved articles were screened in the stepwise process according to the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses checklist to select appropriate articles. All of the results were analyzed and summarized based on some classifications. Out of 335 citations were retrieved, 50 articles were determined as eligible articles through a scoping review. The review results showed that the most favorite DM belonged to Natural language processing (22%) and the most commonly proposed approach was revealing disease characteristics (22%). Regarding diseases, the most addressed disease was COVID-19. The studies show a predominance of applying supervised learning techniques (90%). Concerning healthcare scopes, we found that infectious disease (36%) to be the most frequent, closely followed by epidemiology discipline. The most common software used in the studies was SPSS (22%) and R (20%). The results revealed that some valuable researches conducted by employing the capabilities of knowledge discovery methods to understand the unknown dimensions of diseases in pandemics. But most researches will need in terms of treatment and disease control.