Hoda Moghimi

Intelligent Home Risk-Based Monitoring Solutions Enable Post Acute Care Surveillance

The advancing age of the baby boomer, coupled with increased life spans, has led to a significant increase in the number of senior citizens in many countries. These populations of citizens are projected to significantly impact current and future healthcare resources. Providing care for this population in the acute care setting is only one aspect of the total care package that needs to be addressed. For those having been in the acute care setting for either medical treatment or following procedural-based therapies, the discharge to home often provides an opportunity to continue the post acute care monitoring to ensure that complications or readmissions do not occur. Monitoring care and providing guidance and medical management at home will offer patients, families, facilities and providers with the opportunity to ensure recovery and return to a healthy steady state. To explore this issue further, the following examines the possibilities for monitoring postoperative clinical functions in the context of total knee and/or total hip arthroplasty. Specifically, this research in progress serves to proffer a conceptual model that can then guide a randomised clinical trial to test the presented hypotheses and model.

How Do Business Analytics and Business Intelligence Contribute to Improving Care Efficiency

The growth in volume, variety, and velocity of data has created new challenges and opportunities for healthcare contexts. Although Business Analytics (BA) technologies, techniques and tools are becoming recognised to improve the ability to analyse multi-spectral healthcare data, in and of themselves they are not sufficient to realise the full potential and benefits possible which can lead to optimal patient outcomes. In fact, it becomes a strategic necessity to develop a systematic and organising framework to apply BA technologies to a specific clinical context. Hence, this exploratory study is designed to investigate and thereby develop an appropriate organising framework and then a prototype to apply the benefits of the Business Analytics techniques to Healthcare contexts. The chosen clinical context is oncology and the study site is one of the largest private tertiary hospitals in Melbourne, Australia. Given the importance of cancer care, the cost of cancer treatments and the quantity and range of data elements that are generated during the care process, this case study is significant and important.

Investigating Parents’ Attitude Towards Using Intelligent Solutions in Care Process: The Case of Paediatric Congenital Heart Disease

Complex paediatric disease may take a great advantage of using intelligent solutions to facilitate care processes for parents as well as care providers. Hence, due to the importance of consumers’ empowerment in care process, this study is performed to collect parents’ attitude, towards the use of intelligent decision support solutions to analyse their needs and preferences. In this research, a survey is conducted among patients’ parents affected by paediatric congenital heart disease (CHD), in one of the biggest children’s hospitals in Victoria, Australia. The study findings are divided into aspects of motivators and barriers in relation to how a computer-based intelligent solution is perceived and to be used by patients’ parents.

Exploring the possibilities for intelligent risk detection in healthcare contexts

The exponential growth of data coupled with a rapid increase of service demands in healthcare contexts today requires a robust framework enabled by information technology IT solutions as well as real-time service handling in order to ensure superior decision making and successful healthcare outcomes. Contemporaneous with the challenges facing healthcare, we are witnessing the development of very sophisticated intelligent tools and technologies. Therefore, it would appear to be prudent to investigate the possibility of applying such tools and technologies into various healthcare contexts to facilitate better risk detection and support superior decision making. This study is exploratory in nature and endeavours to explore the main components, barriers, issues and requirements to design and develop an intelligent risk detection framework to be applied to healthcare contexts. The following serves to do this in the context of orthopaedics, total hip and knee arthroplasty and congenital heart disease.

The Acceptance of Nursing Information Systems: An Analysis Using UTAUT

Nurses are the largest group of health-care professionals in hospitals providing 24-h care to patients. Hence, nurses are pivotal in coordinating and communicating patient care information in the complex network of health-care professionals, services, and other care processes. Further, surveillance and timely interventions by nurses impact quality of care, reduce errors, and decrease health-care costs. Information communication technologies (ICTs) provide the capabilities to support many aspects of nursing care. However, within the context of acute nursing care, there is a lack of integrated technology solutions to support the complex interactions associated with nursing activities and thereby the delivery of high-quality and safe care. Generally, to date, the literature reports low levels of acceptance of ICT solutions by nurses. To address this, the following discussion serves to examine nurses’ acceptance of an integrated point-of-care solution for acute nursing contexts. The ICT was specifically designed to be sensitive to nurses’ needs with the expectation that this will lead to high levels of user acceptance. An evaluation of the acceptability of the proposed solution is presented using unified theory of acceptance and use of technology (UTAUT). Through the UTAUT lens, initial reactions of the participating nurses were examined. The findings provided us with feedback to redesign the solution to better fit with the dynamics and complexity of nursing care. The study has implications for theory, including using UTAUT in health-care contexts, and for practice, including recommendations for the design and development of ICT solutions suitable for nursing contexts.

Leveraging Key Aspects of Collaborative Techniques to Assist Clinical Decision Making: The Case of Hip and Knee Arthroplasty

Employing collaborative systems in healthcare contexts has been explored as an important approach towards designing and developing intelligent computer solutions. This approach is concerned with identify the way in which information and decisions are assembled in the collaboration of care parties. In this regards, this study is conducted to develop a real-time collaborative system using an Intelligent Risk Detection Model (IRD) to improve decision efficiency in the case of Hip and Knee Arthroplasty. The benefits of adopting this solution include increasing awareness, supporting communication, improving decision making process and also improving information sharing between surgeons as key collaborative parties in the research case. This paper presents outcomes of an on-line survey and focus group using Design Science Research Methodology (DSRM) to identify requirements of designing the system. It will be then possible to develop the prototype.