Evaluation of clinical practice guideline-derived clinical decision support systems using a novel quality model.

Over the last decade, clinical practice guidelines (CPGs) have become an important asset for daily life in healthcare organizations. Efficient management and digitization of CPGs help achieve organizational objectives and improve patient care and healthcare quality by reducing variability. However, digitizing CPGs is a difficult, complex task because they are usually expressed as text, and this often leads to the development of partial software solutions. At present, different research proposals and CPG-derived CDSS (clinical decision support system) do exist for managing CPG digitalization lifecycles (from modeling to deployment and execution), but they do not all provide full lifecycle support, making it more difficult to choose solutions or proposals that fully meet the needs of a healthcare organization. This paper proposes a method based on quality models to uniformly compare and evaluate technological tools, providing a rigorous method that uses qualitative and quantitative analysis of technological aspects. In addition, this paper also presents how this method has been instantiated to evaluate and compare CPG-derived CDSS by highlighting each phase of the CPG digitization lifecycle. Finally, discussion and analysis of currently available tools are presented, identifying gaps and limitations.

A prospective observational concordance study to evaluate computational model-driven clinical practice guidelines for Type 2 diabetes mellitus.

BACKGROUND: Clinical Practice Guidelines (CPGs) provide healthcare professionals with performance and decision-making support during the treatment of patients. Sometimes, however, they are poorly implemented. The IDE4ICDS platform was developed and validated with CPGs for type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM). OBJECTIVE: The main objective of this paper is to present the results of the clinical validation of the IDE4ICDS platform in a real clinical environment at two health clinics in the Andalusian Public Health System (SSPA) in the southern Spanish region of Andalusia. METHODS: National and international knowledge sources on T2DM were selected and reviewed and used to define a diabetes CPG model on the IDE4ICDS platform. Once the diabetes CPG was configured and deployed, it was validated. A total of 506 patients were identified as meeting the inclusion criteria, of whom 130 could be recruited and 89 attended the appointment. RESULTS: A concordance analysis was performed with the kappa value. Overall agreement between the recommendations provided by the system and those recorded in each patient's EHR was good (0.61 - 0.80) with a total kappa index of 0.701, leading to the conclusion that the system provided appropriate recommendations for each patient and was therefore well-functioning. CONCLUSIONS: A series of possible improvements were identified based on the limitations for the recovery of variables related to the quality of these recolected variables, the detection of duplicate recommendations based on different input variables for the same patient, and clinical usability, such as the capacity to generate reports based on the recommendations generated. Nevertheless, the project resulted in the IDE4ICDS platform: a Clinical Decision Support System (CDSS) capable of providing appropriate recommendations for improving the management and quality of patient care and optimizing health outcomes. The result of this validation is a safe and effective pathway for developing and adopting digital transformation at the regional scale of the use of biomedical knowledge in real healthcare.

Pathophysiology of Age-Related Macular Degeneration: Implications for Treatment.

Age-related macular degeneration (AMD) is a complex, multifactorial, progressive retinal disease that affects millions of people worldwide and has become the leading cause of visual impairment in developed countries. The disease etiopathogenesis is not understood fully, although many triggers and processes that lead to dysfunction and degeneration of the retinal pigment epithelium (RPE) have already been identified. Thus, the lack of cellular control of oxidative stress, altered proteostasis, dysfunction of lipid homeostasis, and mitochondrial dysfunction form an internal feedback loop that causes the RPE to fail and allows accumulation of abnormal misfolded proteins and abnormal lipids that will form drusen. An inadequate antioxidant response, deficits in autophagy mechanisms, and dysregulation of the extracellular matrix (ECM) help to increase the deposition of abnormal drusen material over time. The drusen then act as inflammatory centers that trigger chronic inflammation of the subretinal space in which microglia and recruited macrophages are also involved, and where the complement system is a key component. Choriocapillaris degeneration and nutritional influences are also classic elements recognized in the AMD pathophysiology. The genetic component of the disease is embodied in the recognition of the described risk or protective polymorphisms of some complement and ECM related genes (mainly CFH and ARMS2/HTRA1). Thus, carriers of the risk haplotype at ARMS2/HTRA1 have a higher risk of developing late AMD at a younger age. Finally, gut microbiota and epigenetics may play a role in modulating the progression to advanced AMD with the presence of local inflammatory conditions. Because of multiple implicated processes, different complex combinations of treatments will probably be the best option to obtain the best visual results; they in turn will differ depending on the type and spectrum of disease affecting individual patients or the disease stage in each patient at a specific moment. This will undoubtedly lead to personalized medicine for control and hopefully find a future cure. This necessitates the continued unraveling of all the processes involved in the pathogenesis of AMD that must be understood to devise the combinations of treatments for different concurrent or subsequent problems.

Reflection on Telemedicine Competencies in Spanish Medicine Degrees After the COVID-19 Pandemic.

The pandemic suffered in 2020 following the appearance of the SARS-CoV-2 virus has marked a radical change in the way in which the basic pillars of international, and more specifically Spanish, society are understood. The existing social and economic model has had to adapt abruptly and urgently to the reality of what has happened. The impact that these changes will have after the pandemic is still unclear, but it may be surmised that many of them are here to stay. The use of information and communication technologies has been critical in the pandemic scenario and also in the health environment, where factors like telemedicine have come to play a key role for society. This work presents an initial analysis of how degrees in Medicine train students for telematic work with patients and provides a series of reflections based on the pandemic which may serve as a point of departure for future studies.