Martin Riekert

Using Togaf for Building a National Implementation Strategy for E-Health Services and Technologies in Burundi

In order to better align existing and future ICT implementations in the health domain with the strategic options defined by the National Plan for Health Development, the Ministry of Health (MoH) of Burundi initiated in 2014 the development of a national e-health enterprise architecture based on the TOGAF methodology. A first part of the development cycle consisted of a detailed analysis of regulatory documents and strategic plans related to the Burundian health system. In a second part, semi-structured interviews were organized with a representative sample of relevant MoH health structures. The study demonstrated the donor driven unequal distribution of hardware equipment over health administration components and health facilities. Internet connectivity remains problematic and few health oriented business applications found their way to the Burundian health system. Paper based instruments remain predominant in Burundi’s health administration. The study also identified a series of problems introduced by the uncoordinated development of health ICT in Burundi such as the lack of standardization, data security risks, varying data quality, inadequate ICT infrastructures, an unregulated e-health sector and insufficient human capacity. The results confirm the challenging situation of the Burundian health information system but they also expose a number of bright spots that provide hope for the future: a political will to reclaim MoH leadership in the health information management domain, the readiness to develop e-health education and training programs and the opportunity to capitalize the experiences with DHIS2 deployment, results based financing monitoring and hospital information management systems implementation.

Increasing the Explanatory Power of Investor Sentiment Analysis for Commodities in Online Media.

Online media are an important source for investor sentiment on commodities. Although there is empirical evidence for a relationship between investor sentiment from news and commodity returns, the impact of classifier design on the explanatory power of sentiment for returns has received little attention. We evaluate the explanatory power of nine classifier designs and find that (1) a positive relationship holds between more opinionated online media sentiment and commodity returns, (2) weighting dictionary terms by machine learning increases explanatory power by up to 25%, and (3) the commonly used dictionary of Loughran and McDonald is detrimental for commodity sentiment analysis.

Building а National Clinical Data Warehouse

Turkey has created an e-health vision along with the Health Transformation Program. In this framework, standard coding systems such as standard definitions of the institutions, databank of healthcare providers, standard disease, drug and medical supplies classifications have been developed and a national clinical data warehouse (Health-NET) was established. Health-NET is an integrated, safe, fast and expandable health information system which aims to improve efficiency and quality of health services by collecting all kinds of data produced in the health institutions in line with the standards and generating information adequate for all stakeholders of the collected data.

The Application of PEST Analysis to the Creation of the Profile of na IT Product Designed to Activate and Support Senior Citizens in Poland

The purpose of the paper is to create a profile of an IT product, using IT tools to collect and to analyse information and enable communication between elderly people to support and activate them. PEST Analysis method was used to determine different factors of influence on the domain of elderly people activation and support Having evaluated the factors and defined the product characteristics, the Authors focused on defining the profile of the IT product by referring the aforementioned characteristics to the structure of the product in the marketing understanding thereof.

Interoperability Within E-Health Arena

Integrated care that starts with patients taking care for their health, that includes truly multidisciplinary team approach to treating patients’ conditions and that utilizes enormous existing common knowledge in an efficient way, is one big step towards increasing healthcare provisioning quality while in the same time having healthcare cost under control. The foundation of the integrated care is timely availability of comprehensive information for all stakeholders within healthcare processes independent on their location and information system or application they use. The absolute precondition for this is ability of different IT systems / applications to exchange and display information in a way that is not only comprehensible to all stakeholders but also means the same to all of them. This ability is called interoperability. In this paper, overview of different interoperability aspects for electronic healthcare records / personal healthcare records is given. The main standards / initiatives are explained along with some challenges and possible way forward. Index Terms — Electronic Healthcare Record, Personal Healthcare Record, interoperability EN 13606, openEHR, archetype, HL7 CDA, IHE

Suggestions for the Elicitation of Seniors Involvement in ICT and Socially Innovative Solutions to Tackle IT

Human-computer interaction (HCI) issues for older people are extremely important in the light of the rapidly ageing population in developed countries. In addition, technology offers great potential for this age group, but it will be only useful if it can be used effectively by its target users. We will therefore examine how HCI can address the needs and situations of this increasing older population and how their involvement can be maximized in order to support participation and empowerment. In recent years, HCI technologies have manifested their potential to enhance the autonomy and quality of the life of elderly people, through boosting the elicitation of seniors. This paper is describing a methodology and challenges that will support healthcare professionals’ action in the further effective usage of systems based on HCI.

Big data in Neurosurgery - Intelligent Support for Brain Tumor Consilium

A brain tumor occurs when abnormal cells form within the brain. Medical imaging plays a central role in the diagnosis of brain tumors. When a brain tumor is diagnosed, a medical team will be formed (consilium) to assess the treatment options presented by the leading surgeon to the patient and his/her family. Using historical evidence-based healthcare data and information directly extracted from images to categorize them may support to increase decision for treatment of patient with brain tumor. Due to its complexity, cancer care is increasingly being dependent on multidisciplinary tumor consilium. That is why it is very important to avoid emotional and quick decisions done by members of consilium. Few studies have investigated how best to organize and run consilium in order to facilitates important decision about patient therapy. We developed and evaluated a multiparametric approach designed to improve the consilium ability to reach treatment decisions. In particular the use of discriminative classification methods such as support vector machines and the use of local brain image meta-data were empirically shown to be important building blocks as support for therapy assign. For efficient classification we used fast SVM classifier with new kernel method.