Navigating Challenges in Teleradiology Implementation: A Case Study from Saudi Arabia's Healthcare System.

Background and Aims: Teleradiology is the practice of interpreting medical images acquired in an off-site location. Teleradiology has been utilized widely around the world to address the needs for subspecialty coverage, workload balancing, and as a solution for understaffing. This study aims to assess the perceptions of teleradiology among radiologists in Saudi Arabia, investigate any challenges they might face, and explore strategies that would help mitigate those challenges. Methods: A cross-sectional study using a self-administered electronic questionnaire was conducted to collect responses from radiologists practicing or having practiced teleradiology in Saudi Arabia. The questionnaire was conducted from January to June 2023, and 105 responses were included in the analysis. The responses were analyzed using chi-squared testing to investigate factors affecting the radiologists' perceptions. Results: The most common challenges for teleradiology were access to patients' health records, access to prior imaging exams, and concerns about image quality assurance. Around 74% of participants perceived teleradiology to be beneficial for geographic, after-hour, and subspecialties coverage. Teleradiology was also perceived to help reduce the turn-around time of radiology interpretations. Better communication with referring physicians and technologists was seen as a way to help improve teleradiology services. Conclusion: The findings suggest that the perception of teleradiology's challenges and benefits may not be influenced by experience, workplace, or subspecialty. Emphasis should be placed on the importance of quality assurance of images acquired remotely. Addressing the concerns and challenges related to access to patients' health records is also crucial to ensuring the successful implementation of teleradiology in the country.

Proposed Questions to Assess the Extent of Knowledge in Understanding the Radiology Report Language.

Radiotherapy and diagnostic imaging play a significant role in medical care. The amount of patient participation and communication can be increased by helping patients understand radiology reports. There is insufficient information on how to measure a patient's knowledge of a written radiology report. The goal of this study is to design a tool that will measure patient literacy of radiology reports. A radiological literacy tool was created and evaluated as part of the project. There were two groups of patients: control and intervention. A sample radiological report was provided to each group for reading. After reading the report, the groups were quizzed to see how well they understood the report. The participants answered the questions and the correlation between the understanding of the radiology report and the radiology report literacy questions was calculated. The correlations between radiology report literacy questions and radiology report understanding for the intervention and control groups were 0.522, p < 0.001, and 0.536, p < 0.001, respectively. Our radiology literacy tool demonstrated a good ability to measure the awareness of radiology report understanding (area under the receiver operator curve in control group (95% CI: 0.77 (0.71-0.81)) and intervention group (95% CI: 0.79 (0.74-0.84))). We successfully designed a tool that can measure the radiology literacy of patients. This tool is one of the first to measure the level of patient knowledge in the field of radiology understanding.

Identifying the underlying factors associated with antidepressant drug discontinuation: content analysis of patients' drug reviews.

The rate of antidepressant prescriptions is globally increasing. A large portion of patients stop their medications, which could lead to many side effects including relapse, and anxiety. The aim of this was to develop a drug-continuity prediction model and identify the factors associated with drug-continuity using online patient forums. We retrieved 982 antidepressant drug reviews from the online patient's forum AskaPatient.com. We followed the Analytical Framework Method to extract structured data from unstructured data. Using the structured data, we examined the factors associated with antidepressant discontinuity and developed a predictive model using multiple machine learning techniques. We tested multiple machine learning techniques which resulted in different performances ranging from accuracy of 65% to 82%. We found that Random Forest algorithm provides the highest prediction method with 82% Accuracy, 78% Precision, 88.03% Recall, and 84.2% F1-Score. The factors associated with drug discontinuity the most were: withdrawal symptoms, effectiveness-ineffectiveness, perceived-distress-adverse drug reaction, rating, and perceiveddistress related to withdrawal symptoms. Although the nature of data available at online forums differ from data collected through surveys, we found that online patients forum can be a valuable source of data for drug continuity prediction and understanding patients experience. The factors identified through our techniques were consistent with the findings of prior studies that used surveys.

The Adoption of Mobile Health Applications Among University Students in Health Colleges.

BACKGROUND: Studies documented the important role of health-care professionals in encouraging their patients to adopt and use mobile health applications. Health-care professionals who use and believe in mobile health applications are more likely to encourage and empower their patients to use it. Likewise, students in health-profession related specialties who use mobile health applications are more likely to continue to do so when they join the workforce. OBJECTIVE: The objective of this study was to examine the rate of adoption of mobile health applications in students in health colleges, identify the types of health applications used by health students, and identify the barriers that prevent the use of mobile health applications. METHODS: A descriptive cross-sectional study was conducted among university students. Students were invited to participate in a self-administrated survey from five health colleges. The survey included questions about the pattern of utilization, the purpose of the health-related application being used, and the barriers to adoption. The analysis included descriptive statistics using SPSS. RESULTS: A total of 383 students participated in this study. The within gender comparison showed that more female students were using health-related applications 59.8% compared to male students 49%. The most frequent purpose of using mobile health applications were tracking physical activities 72.5% followed by counting calories intake 44%. We also identified the frequency and duration of use as well as the factors which may impact students intention to use. CONCLUSION: Fitness and dietary related applications were more common which might be explained by the fact that we only included a younger age group. The reported levels of perceived usefulness, accessibility and ease of use suggest that students will continue to use it.

Understanding patient needs and gaps in radiology reports through online discussion forum analysis.

Our objective is to investigate patient needs and understand information gaps in radiology reports using patient questions that were posted on online discussion forums. We leveraged online question and answer platforms to collect questions posted by patients to understand current gaps and patient needs. We retrieved six hundred fifty-nine (659) questions using the following sites: Yahoo Answers, Reddit.com, Quora, and Wiki Answers. The questions retrieved were analyzed and the major themes and topics were identified. The questions retrieved were classified into eight major themes. The themes were related to the following topics: radiology report, safety, price, preparation, procedure, meaning, medical staff, and patient portal. Among the 659 questions, 35.50% were concerned with the radiology report. The most common question topics in the radiology report focused on patient understanding of the radiology report (62 of 234 [26.49%]), image visualization (53 of 234 [22.64%]), and report representation (46 of 234 [19.65%]). We also found that most patients were concerned about understanding the MRI report (32%; n = 143) compared with the other imaging modalities (n = 434). Using online discussion forums, we discussed major unmet patient needs and information gaps in radiology reports. These issues could be improved to enhance radiology design in the future.

Designing a Consumer-Friendly Radiology Report using a Patient-Centered Approach.

Patient portals have helped accelerate patient engagement in treatment. Patient understanding of radiology reports has become a necessity, and we are working to design a patient-friendly radiology report that can be easily understood. We have based the design of this new radiology report on the results of a previous study that examined patient desires and needs by exploring their questions posted on online discussion forums. The current design was tested by presenting it in two groups, a control group, and an intervention group. In our evaluation, we relied on the following five concepts: understanding (quiz), cosmetics appearance, perceived ease of use, acceptance, and preference. The results showed that the new design outperformed the current design in all five concepts with an overall of (P < .00). Based on these results, we have determined that the radiology report should include both an image and notes section, and the design can be applied to all types of radiological examinations using various imaging devices. We believe this design will be an important building block in facilitating patient understanding of radiology reports.

Full Radiology Report through Patient Web Portal: A Literature Review.

The aim of this study discusses the gap between the patient web portal and providing a full radiology report. A literature review was conducted to examine radiologists, physicians, and patients' opinions and preferences of providing patients with online access radiology reports. The databases searched were Pubmed and Google Scholar and the initial search included 927 studies. After review, 47 studies were included in the study. We identified several themes, including patients' understanding of radiology reports and radiological images, as well as the need for decreasing the turnaround time for reports availability. The existing radiology reports written for physicians are not suited for patients. Further studies are needed to guide and inform the design of patient friendly radiology reports. One of the ways that can be used to fill the gap between patients and radiology reports is using social media sites.

Use of dietary and performance-enhancing supplements among male fitness center members in Riyadh: A cross-sectional study.

This study aimed to explore the health beliefs and patterns of dietary supplement usage among fitness center members. This cross-sectional study was conducted in four large indoor fitness centers in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. This study involved male fitness center members aged ≥18 years with no speech or hearing disabilities. In-person interviews were conducted with fitness center members who agreed to participate using a newly developed questionnaire. Information on participants' sociodemographics (e.g., age and education), smoking status, health status, exercise frequency, average time spent exercising, different supplements used, used supplements sources, and health beliefs regarding dietary supplements were obtained. A total of 445 fitness center members agreed to participate, and 198 of them reported taking dietary supplements. Most participants were between the age of 18 and 25 years (66%), had a college degree (74%), non-smokers (77%), healthy (84%), and perform exercise at least thrice weekly (52%) for at least 1 hour (63%). The percentage of participants who had favorable health views on dietary supplements was significantly higher among the supplement users than among the non-users (P<0.0001). Proteins, multivitamins, amino acids, and omega 3 fatty acids were the most commonly reported supplements used. Almost 30% of the supplement users reported buying them overseas, 28% online, 25% from a pharmacy or supplement store, 19% from a medical clinic, and 17% from peddlers. Public health campaigns are needed to educate the public on the potential harmful effects of supplements if purchased from an unofficial seller or taken without seeking medical advice before using them.

Using cognitive fit theory to evaluate patient understanding of medical images.

Patients are increasingly presented with their health data through patient portals in an attempt to engage patients in their own care. Due to the large amounts of data generated during a patient visit, the medical information when shared with patients can be overwhelming and cause anxiety due to lack of understanding. Health care organizations are attempting to improve transparency by providing patients with access to visit information. In this paper, we present our findings from a research study to evaluate patient understanding of medical images. We used cognitive fit theory to evaluate existing tools and images that are shared with patients and analyzed the relevance of such sharing. We discover that medical images need a lot of customization before they can be shared with patients. We suggest that new tools for medical imaging should be developed to fit the cognitive abilities of patients.