Suicide in services for mental health and substance use: A national hybrid registry surveillance system.

Suicide is strongly associated with mental health and substance use disorders, which makes mental health- and substance misuse services important areas for suicide prevention. The aim of The Norwegian Surveillance System for Suicide in Mental Health and Substance Use Services is to describe all suicide deaths in Norway that occur within one year after contact with mental health and substance misuse services. The study uses a hybrid registry case series design. It consists of a yearly linkage between the Norwegian Cause of Death Registry and the Norwegian Patient Registry, which is linked with a questionnaire. The linkage is conducted by using a cryptographic hash function of the deceased's personal id, thus ensuring that the project can link data across sources without the use of directly identifiable information. This indirect linkage ensures the deceased's confidentiality. Moreover, the The Norwegian Surveillance System for Suicide shows how administratively collected data can be harnessed and used for surveillance. Both use of hybrid registry designs and linkage through cryptographic hash functions might contribute to the development of health informatics as well as quality improvement in health care.

Moving psychological assessment out of the controlled laboratory setting: Practical challenges.

Behavioral assessment using smart devices affords novel methods, notably remote self-administration by the individuals themselves. However, this new approach requires navigating complex legal and technical terrain. Given the limited empirical data that currently exists, we provide and discuss anecdotes of the methodological, technical, legal, and cultural issues associated with an implementation in both U.S. and European settings of a mobile software application for regular psychological monitoring purposes. The tasks required participants to listen, watch, speak, and touch to interact with the smart device, thus assessing cognition, motor skill, and language. Four major findings merit mention: First, moving assessment out of the hands of a trained investigator necessitates excellent usability engineering, such that the tool is easily usable by the participant and the resulting data relevant to the investigator. Second, remote assessment requires that the data are transferred safely back to the investigator, and that risk of compromising participant confidentiality is minimized. Third, frequent data collection over long periods of time is associated with a possibility that participants may choose to withdraw consent for participation thus requiring data retraction. Fourth, data collection and analysis across international borders creates new challenges and new opportunities because of important cultural and language issues that may inform the underlying behavioral constructs of interest. In conclusion, the new technological frameworks provide unprecedented opportunities for remote self-administered behavioral assessments but will be most productive in multidisciplinary teams to ensure the highest level of user satisfaction and data quality, and to guarantee the highest level of data protection. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).

A Dietary Assessment App for Hospitalized Patients at Nutritional Risk: Development and Evaluation of the MyFood App.

BACKGROUND: Disease-related malnutrition is a common challenge among hospitalized patients. There seems to be a lack of an effective system to follow-up nutritional monitoring and treatment of patients at nutritional risk after risk assessment. We identify a need for a more standardized system to prevent and treat disease-related malnutrition. OBJECTIVE: We aimed to develop a dietary assessment app for tablets for use in a hospital setting and to evaluate the app's ability to measure individual intake of energy, protein, liquid, and food and beverage items among hospitalized patients for two days. We also aimed to measure patients' experiences using the app. METHODS: We have developed the MyFood app, which consists of three modules: 1) collection of information about the patient, 2) dietary assessment function, and 3) evaluation of recorded intake compared to individual needs. We used observations from digital photography of the meals, combined with partial weighing of the meal components, as a reference method to evaluate the app's dietary assessment system for two days. Differences in the intake estimations of energy, protein, liquid, and food and beverage items between MyFood and the photograph method were analyzed on both group and individual level. RESULTS: Thirty-two patients hospitalized at Oslo University Hospital were included in the study. The data collection period ran from March to May 2017. About half of the patients had ≥90% agreement between MyFood and the photograph method for energy, protein, and liquid intake on both recording days. Dinner was the meal with the lowest percent agreement between methods. MyFood overestimated patients' intake of bread and cereals and underestimated fruit consumption. Agreement between methods increased from day 1 to day 2 for bread and cereals, spreads, egg, yogurt, soup, hot dishes, and desserts. Ninety percent of participants reported that MyFood was easy to use, and 97% found the app easy to navigate. CONCLUSIONS: We developed the MyFood app as a tool to monitor dietary intake among hospitalized patients at nutritional risk. The recorded intake of energy, protein, and liquid using MyFood showed good agreement with the photograph method for the majority of participants. The app's ability to estimate intake within food groups was good, except for bread and cereals which were overestimated and fruits which were underestimated. The app was well accepted among study participants and has the potential to be a dietary assessment tool for use among patients in clinical practice.