Vincenzo Currò

Randomised controlled trial assessing the effectiveness of a booklet on the duration of breast feeding

OBJECTIVE To test the efficacy of an information booklet to increase the duration of breast feeding. RESEARCH DESIGN Randomised design, stratifying by maternal residence and working activity. Two hundred women were recruited, 103 received the booklet and verbal counselling and 97 verbal counselling only. POPULATION Infants observed from 15 September 1993 to 15 June 1994 in the well baby outpatient clinic of the Paediatric Institute of the Catholic University of Rome, Italy. MAIN RESULTS No statistically significant difference was found between the two groups in the prevalence of exclusive or complementary breast feeding at 6 months of age: 48.5% and 59.2% in the intervention group, 43.7% and 51.5% in the control group. The median duration of exclusive or complementary breast feeding was 24 and 27 weeks in the treated group, 22 and 25 in the control group. CONCLUSIONS The information booklet alone does not seem to increase the duration and the prevalence of breast feeding at 6 months of age. The use of written material with a more individualised support and more extensive use of randomised clinical trials in the evaluation of health promoting programmes is recommended.

A quality evaluation methodology of health web-pages for non-professionals

Primary objective: The proposal of an evaluation methodology for determining the quality of healthcare web sites for the dissemination of medical information to non-professionals. Methods and procedures: Three (macro) factors are considered for the quality evaluation: medical contents, accountability of the authors, and usability of the web site. Starting from two results in the literature the problem of whether or not to introduce a weighting function has been investigated. This methodology has been validated on a specialized information content, i.e., sore throats, due to the large interest such a topic enjoys with target users. The World Wide Web was accessed using a meta-search system merging several search engines. A statistical analysis was made to compare the proposed methodology with the obtained ranks of the sample web pages. Main outcome and results: The statistical analysis confirms that the variables examined (per item and sub factor) show substantially similar ranks and are capable of contributing to the evaluation of the main quality macro factors. A comparison between the aggregation functions in the proposed methodology (non-weighted averages) and the weighting functions, derived from the literature, allowed us to verify the suitability of the method. Conclusions: The proposed methodology suggests a simple approach which can quickly award an overall quality score for medical web sites oriented to non-professionals.

Man-machine interfaces to medical information systems

A joint project to provide an environment for prototyping and validating advanced man-machine interaction techniques for medical information systems is reported. The topics discussed are: data models and knowledge-representation languages for describing medical information, graphical display and interaction environments, user modeling capabilities, and personalization tools. The preliminary results of the project are sketched.<<ETX>>

Browsing in an ambulatory information system

A graphical multiwindow user interface to an ambulatory information system is presented. Its friendliness and effectiveness rise from a highly structured external data representation and easy interaction techniques for reading and querying the information base. The techniques are primarily based on browsing, enriched with advanced navigation functionality to speed up consultation and allow easy query formulation. The interaction is almost entirely carried on by direct manipulation of the displayed objects. The information base concerns the outpatient pediatric department of the Catholic University of Rome and comprises patient medical records including personal and family history and physical examinations.<<ETX>>

A distributed system for the integrated management of general and subspecialist pediatric outpatient clinic

ARPIA II is a system for handling, on a local area network, a distributed enviroment of pediatric outpatients clinic. The main user requirements, standardization aspects and functionality taken into account in designing this system are presented.

Outpatient Information System And Medical User: An I/O Device Evaluation

An experiment for evaluating some relevant factors in human-computer interaction with health care information systems is described. The results concern the comparison among three lnpuVOutput devices that can be used by the staff who manipulate medical records during outpatient care. A data entry activity, based on item selections and (short string) typing, has been considered as the basic task to cany on. A touch screen, a mouse and a keyboard, used as stand alone devices, have been compared by medical subjects, in terns of preferences and time needed to fill a sequence of reservation forms. The results show that the touch screen seems to be a promising device for the implementation of an efficient and friendly interaction environment with a medical information system.