Alessio Luschi

A Custom Decision-Support Information System for Structural and Technological Analysis in Healthcare

This paper presents a custom informative system called SACS, a software that drives Autocad to manage and analyze digital plans of hospital buildings coded on specific layers. The software maps Departments, Operative Units, Destinations of Use, healthcare technologies and environmental comforts grouping info by single rooms and homogeneous areas, giving quantitative and qualitative results. System outputs can be used by top-management as a decision-support aid to assess parameters to improve the hospital’s structure and organization.

A Web Based Integrated Healthcare Facility Management System

This paper presents a custom decision-support information system to analyze and manage healthcare buildings, estate and assets in relation to the carried on activities. The software drives Autocad plans to retrieve structural information and to store any kind of structured data with a room-scale definition. Each room is grouped in homogeneous areas with its own assets, technologies and environmental comforts, giving quantitative and qualitative results. System outputs can be used by the top-management to assess parameters and improve the structure and organization.

Careggi Smart hospital: A mobile app for patients, citizens and healthcare staff

This paper presents a mobile app called “Careggi Smart Hospital” which has been developed for the Careggi Polyclinic in Florence. The application is designed for Android smartphones and tablets and it is freely downloadable from the Google Play Store. It provides various useful tools to the hospitals users such as personnel and structures finding, way-finding and the possibility to access personal medical records collected on regional electronic health record.

LICENSE: Web Application for Monitoring and Controlling Hospitals’ Status with Respect to Legislative Standards

This article describes LICENSE, an expert system that is able to automatically verify the compliance with legislative requirements, both structural and technological. These requirements have to be observed by a health facility, public or private, in order to be accredited and to work on behalf of the Regional Healthcare Service. The system consists of a web application that can be used by the hospital top management as well as by the clinical engineer or by the quality management office, so as to evaluate and monitor the hospital’s status. The evaluation is performed on the basis of the intended use of the premises, the surface, the number of beds or technical beds, and the class of the biomedical technologies available. The software’s structure has been made adaptable to the legislative changes through the creation of an associated database.

Assisted Reproductive Technology Center Design with Quality Function Deployment Approach

Assisted Reproductive Technology (ART) is the technology used to achieve pregnancy in procedures such as fertility medication, artificial insemination, in-vitro fertilization and surrogacy. The paper shows an application of Quality Function Deployment method to Careggi Hospital ART Laboratory of Florence in order to give a prioritization order for ameliorative interventions.

Navigation Algorithm for the Evacuation of Hospitalized Patients

The paper presents a model to support evacuation plans design for fire emergency management in healthcare facilities. It relies on existing path analysis algorithms such as Dijkstra and fire propagation simulation, also evaluating the level of criticality typical of healthcare facilities such as patients’ speed based upon their illness and admission and architectural structure of wards. The algorithm automatically evaluates the safest evacuation path (which may not coincide with the shortest) for single typology of patient (ambulating, partially-ambulating, completely non-ambulating, auto-sufficient or not) and inpatient unit (ICU, ordinary ward, short-observation unit) in relation to the position of the fire trigger. The results of the algorithm are shown by using SVG-rendered graphic of existing hospital’s layout.

Assessing the Impact of a CIS/PACS Technology for a Cardiology Department Using QFD Methodology

The paper shows how a QFD technique can be applied in the preliminary steps of a Health Technology Assessment to obtain quantitative parameters that help the Top Management of a hospital to choose the most correlated features with the expressed customers (medical staff and patients) needs. In particular the study focuses on assessing the acquisition of a new CIS/PACS infrastructure (Cardiology Information System / Picture Archiving and Communications System) for the Cardiology Department of the Meyer Hospital in Firenze, Italy.

Decision Support Systems in Healthcare

This chapter describes the important role of Decision Support Systems (DSS) in healthcare. An introduction section shows the evolution of these systems through the years. Then there are two examples of DSSs designed and realized by the authors and currently used in some big hospitals in Tuscany, Italy. The first one is a clinical DSS, for the management of Congestive Heart Failure, consisting of a machine learning engine that works together with custom hardware, provided with different software modules dedicated to cardiologists, general practitioners, nurses, and patients themselves. The second is a nonclinical DSS addressed to the hospital management and consists of a tool to help the decision makers by giving them a deep knowledge on their healthcare structures, in terms of spaces and their uses. The DSS is also provided with an expert system to analyze the compliance of the structures to regional and national standards and requirements.

Risk management process on a new microwave thermal ablation device: assessment and follow up

Despite representing a new and promising technique for the minimally invasive cure of cancer, there are still few available microwave thermal ablation devices ready for clinical use. Safety for patients and users has therefore to be guaranteed for every new thermal ablative device with an indepth risk management process. This paper describes the feedback of the proactive risk management study on a new microwave thermal ablation device, started in 2013, and the follow-up of the risk management process which allowed the realization of the first working prototype of the device and, eventually, will lead to its CE marking.

Creation of a system for the coding of medical devices

Medical devices have different nomenclatures for their classification. Some of the most significant nomenclatures are the Universal Medical Device Nomenclature System (UMDNS) and the Global Medical Device Nomenclature (GMDN) by the Emergency Care Research Institute (ECRI). In Italy the main are CIVAB and “Classificazione Nazionale Dispositivi Medici” (National Classification for Medical Devices - CND). The aim of this study is to create a system to automatically decode several device models from CIVAB to UMDNS code. All medical devices are coded with a table which is based on their definitions presented in these nomenclatures. The coding is lastly applied to a list of models of medical devices, developed by different companies.