An informatics research agenda to support patient and family empowerment and engagement in care and recovery during and after hospitalization.

As part of an interdisciplinary acute care patient portal task force with members from 10 academic medical centers and professional organizations, we held a national workshop with 71 attendees representing over 30 health systems, professional organizations, and technology companies. Our consensus approach identified 7 key sociotechnical and evaluation research focus areas related to the consumption and capture of information from patients, care partners (eg, family, friends), and clinicians through portals in the acute and post-acute care settings. The 7 research areas were: (1) standards, (2) privacy and security, (3) user-centered design, (4) implementation, (5) data and content, (6) clinical decision support, and (7) measurement. Patient portals are not yet in routine use in the acute and post-acute setting, and research focused on the identified domains should increase the likelihood that they will deliver benefit, especially as there are differences between needs in acute and post-acute care compared to the ambulatory setting.

The Human Brain Project: Creating a European Research Infrastructure to Decode the Human Brain.

Decoding the human brain is perhaps the most fascinating scientific challenge in the 21st century. The Human Brain Project (HBP), a 10-year European Flagship, targets the reconstruction of the brain's multi-scale organization. It uses productive loops of experiments, medical, data, data analytics, and simulation on all levels that will eventually bridge the scales. The HBP IT architecture is unique, utilizing cloud-based collaboration and development platforms with databases, workflow systems, petabyte storage, and supercomputers. The HBP is developing toward a European research infrastructure advancing brain research, medicine, and brain-inspired information technology.

Dynamic Staffing and Rescheduling in Software Project Management: A Hybrid Approach.

Resource allocation could be influenced by various dynamic elements, such as the skills of engineers and the growth of skills, which requires managers to find an effective and efficient tool to support their staffing decision-making processes. Rescheduling happens commonly and frequently during the project execution. Control options have to be made when new resources are added or tasks are changed. In this paper we propose a software project staffing model considering dynamic elements of staff productivity with a Genetic Algorithm (GA) and Hill Climbing (HC) based optimizer. Since a newly generated reschedule dramatically different from the initial schedule could cause an obvious shifting cost increase, our rescheduling strategies consider both efficiency and stability. The results of real world case studies and extensive simulation experiments show that our proposed method is effective and could achieve comparable performance to other heuristic algorithms in most cases.

Changing Medical School IT to Support Medical Education Transformation.

PROBLEM: Many medical schools are modifying curricula to reflect the rapidly evolving health care environment, but schools struggle to provide the educational informatics technology (IT) support to make the necessary changes. Often a medical school's IT support for the education mission derives from isolated work units employing separate technologies that are not interoperable. INTERVENTION: We launched a redesigned, tightly integrated, and novel IT infrastructure to support a completely revamped curriculum at the Vanderbilt School of Medicine. This system uses coordinated and interoperable technologies to support new instructional methods, capture students' effort, and manage feedback, allowing the monitoring of students' progress toward specific competency goals across settings and programs. CONTEXT: The new undergraduate medical education program at Vanderbilt, entitled Curriculum 2.0, is a competency-based curriculum in which the ultimate goal is medical student advancement based on performance outcomes and personal goals rather than a time-based sequence of courses. IT support was essential in the creation of Curriculum 2.0. In addition to typical learning and curriculum management functions, IT was needed to capture data in the learning workflow for analysis, as well as for informing individual and programmatic success. We aligned people, processes, and technology to provide the IT infrastructure for the organizational transformation. OUTCOMES: Educational IT personnel were successfully realigned to create the new IT system. The IT infrastructure enabled monitoring of student performance within each competency domain across settings and time via personal student electronic portfolios. Students use aggregated performance data, derived in real time from the portfolio, for mentor-guided performance assessment, and for creation of individual learning goals and plans. Poorly performing students were identified earlier through online communication systems that alert the appropriate instructor or coach of low quiz grades or missed learning goals. Graphical and narrative displays of a student's competency performance across courses and clinical experiences informed high-stake decisions made about student progress by the promotions committee. Similarly, graphical display of aggregate student outcomes provided education leaders with information needed to adjust and improve the curriculum. LESSONS LEARNED: With the alignment of people, processes, and technology, educational IT can facilitate transformational steps in the training of medical students.

Informatic resources useful for the development of biomedical applications of nanomaterials and their toxicological evaluation / Recursos informáticos útiles en el desarrollo de aplicaciones biomédicas de nanomateriales y su evaluación toxicológica

The need for tools to process all the information generated in the field of nanotechnology has led to the development of a new discipline known as nanoinformatics. In the coming years, it is expected to have databases with information, not only on the physicochemical properties of nanomaterials, but also with information on the potential interactions with environment and biological systems, which will enable search for new biomedical applications of nanomaterials, without forgetting their toxicological aspects. In this review, various standardization resources, ontologies, databases, initiatives and partnerships that will help manage the information generated on nanomaterials are presented, especially those useful in biomedical research and the toxicology of nanomaterials. In addition, other complementary web resources are described with the aim of facilitating the process of self-learning and the development of curriculum contents of nanotechnology in higher education centers (AU)

La necesidad de herramientas informáticas para procesar toda la información generada en el ámbito de la nanotecnología ha originado el desarrollo de una nueva disciplina conocida como nanoinformática. En los próximos años es esperable poder disponer de bases de datos con información, no sólo de las propiedades físico-químicas de los nanomateriales, sino también con información de sus posibles interacciones con el medio ambiente y sistemas biológicos, lo que favorecerá la investigación de nuevas aplicaciones biomédicas de los nanomateriales, sin olvidar sus aspectos toxicológicos. En este artículo se presentan diversos recursos de estandarización, ontologías, bases de datos, iniciativas y colaboraciones que ayudan a gestionar la información generada sobre nanomateriales, especialmente orientados a favorecer la Investigación biomédica y la toxicología de los nanomateriales. Además, se presentan otros recursos web complementarios que facilitarán el proceso de autoaprendizaje y el desarrollo de contenidos curriculares en escuelas superiores y facultades, útiles en la formación de esta nueva disciplina, denominada nanotecnología (AU)

Access to core facilities and other research resources provided by the Clinical and Translational Science Awards.

Principal investigators who received Clinical and Translational Science Awards created academic homes for biomedical research. They developed program-supported websites to offer coordinated access to a range of core facilities and other research resources. Visitors to the 60 websites will find at least 170 generic services, which this review has categorized in the following seven areas: (1) core facilities, (2) biomedical informatics, (3) funding, (4) regulatory knowledge and support, (5) biostatistics, epidemiology, research design, and ethics, (6) participant and clinical interaction resources, and (7) community engagement. In addition, many websites facilitate access to resources with search engines, navigators, studios, project development teams, collaboration tools, communication systems, and teaching tools. Each of these websites may be accessed from a single site, http://www.CTSAcentral.org. The ability to access the research resources from 60 of the nation's academic health centers presents a novel opportunity for investigators engaged in clinical and translational research.

The affective shift model of work engagement.

On the basis of self-regulation theories, the authors develop an affective shift model of work engagement according to which work engagement emerges from the dynamic interplay of positive and negative affect. The affective shift model posits that negative affect is positively related to work engagement if negative affect is followed by positive affect. The authors applied experience sampling methodology to test the model. Data on affective events, mood, and work engagement was collected twice a day over 9 working days among 55 software developers. In support of the affective shift model, negative mood and negative events experienced in the morning of a working day were positively related to work engagement in the afternoon if positive mood in the time interval between morning and afternoon was high. Individual differences in positive affectivity moderated within-person relationships. The authors discuss how work engagement can be fostered through affect regulation.

The role of organizational insiders' developmental feedback and proactive personality on newcomers' performance: an interactionist perspective.

Drawing from an interactionist approach and feedback research, we examine the role of developmental feedback and proactive personality on newcomer task performance and helping behavior. Data were collected from 2 high-tech joint-ventures within the information technology and manufacturing industries located in Shanghai, China. Results based on 151 newcomer-manager dyads showed that supervisor developmental feedback (SDF) positively related to newcomer helping behavior and that SDF and coworker developmental feedback interactively predicted newcomer task performance. We also found differential moderating effects of proactive personality: SDF more strongly related to helping behavior when proactive personality was lower; conversely, coworker developmental feedback more strongly related to helping behavior when proactive personality was higher.

Best use of experimental data in cancer informatics.

The welcome attitude of the 'omics community, journals and funders of research towards data sharing, coupled with successful implementations of data standards, has resulted in resource dissemination and a better understanding of many diseases, including cancer. Sharing experiment data is beneficial in terms of knowledge generation, allowing reproduction and validation of results. An adherence to a reporting guideline enables full-value extraction from costly data; this is an inexpensive method to increased quality without incurring disproportionate costs. For therapy data in particular, easy access to the range of new approaches and the ability to perform valid comparisons between these approaches would be especially useful. We discuss initiatives that support resource sharing and summarize three reporting guidelines for experiment data that have been adopted successfully. Finally, we introduce a new guideline that encompasses the diverse data types in therapeutic experiments, which is intended to be of use to the cancer therapeutics community.

La informática aplicada a la salud reproductiva posibilita una mejor práctica clínica: [revisión] / Better clinical practice made possible by IT in reproductive health: [review]

En abril de 2006, los US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) publicaron normativas clínicas acerca de la salud reproductiva con el objetivo de promover mejoras en la evolución de los embarazos en Estados Unidos. La integración de la salud reproductiva en la práctica cotidiana todavía representa un desafío para los médicos clínicos. Esto se debe en parte a la percepción de que la salud reproductiva es una prestación agregada en lugar de un aspecto integral de la atención primaria de las mujeres en edad fértil. La provisión de estas prestaciones por los sistemas de atención primaria se ha limitado debido a la falta de promoción de métodos clínicos que contribuyan a la evaluación del riesgo y los procesos de intervención. Las novedades en el contexto de la informática aplicada a la salud expanden las posibilidades de perfeccionar los importantes servicios de la salud reproductiva en la actividad médica cotidiana. Una revisión de estos avances informáticos relacionados con la salud reproductiva podría contribuir a la optimización de estos servicios por parte de los médicos clínicos.

La informática aplicada a la salud reproductiva posibilita una mejor práctica clínica: [revisión] / Better clinical practice made possible by IT in reproductive health: [review]

En abril de 2006, los US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) publicaron normativas clínicas acerca de la salud reproductiva con el objetivo de promover mejoras en la evolución de los embarazos en Estados Unidos. La integración de la salud reproductiva en la práctica cotidiana todavía representa un desafío para los médicos clínicos. Esto se debe en parte a la percepción de que la salud reproductiva es una prestación agregada en lugar de un aspecto integral de la atención primaria de las mujeres en edad fértil. La provisión de estas prestaciones por los sistemas de atención primaria se ha limitado debido a la falta de promoción de métodos clínicos que contribuyan a la evaluación del riesgo y los procesos de intervención. Las novedades en el contexto de la informática aplicada a la salud expanden las posibilidades de perfeccionar los importantes servicios de la salud reproductiva en la actividad médica cotidiana. Una revisión de estos avances informáticos relacionados con la salud reproductiva podría contribuir a la optimización de estos servicios por parte de los médicos clínicos.(AU)

Working women's lifestyles and quality of life in the information society.

We investigate the lifestyles of Spanish women workers engaged in the information and communication society and analyze key indicators of lifestyle as predictors of their quality of life. In this study, 207 women aged between 19 and 54 years responded to questions related to daily activities and to a quality-of-life questionnaire. We concluded that Spanish women in this study show regular and healthy habits in diet and prevention behaviors, and we also identify important quality-of-life predicting factors in issues related to personal time management.

Use of pharmacy informatics resources by clinical pharmacy services in acute care hospitals.

PURPOSE: The use of pharmacy informatics resources by clinical pharmacy services and the presence of a pharmacy informatics specialist in acute care hospitals were evaluated. METHODS: Two hundred randomly selected pharmacies in general medical and surgical hospitals in the United States with at least 100 acute care beds were surveyed via mail. Survey items gathered information regarding facility attributes, opinions about staff pharmacists' understanding of information technology, and departmental utilization of pharmacy informatics. RESULTS: Of the 200 surveys mailed, 114 (57%) were returned completed. When asked to rate their departments' use of pharmacy informatics, 82% indicated that pharmacy informatics use was good or fair, while 12% considered information use to be optimized. A majority of respondents (60%) indicated that a pharmacy informatics specialist was employed within the pharmacy, with 47% indicating that the specialist was a pharmacist. An overwhelming percentage of these pharmacists received informatics training on the job, and roughly half had specialty positions integrated into their pharmacist job description. No significant association existed between the use of pharmacy informatics and facility teaching status (teaching versus nonteaching), geographic location (urban versus rural), or use of computerized prescriber order entry. Employment of a pharmacy informatics specialist was significantly associated with the use of such informatics applications as database mining, renal-dosing-rules engines, antibiotic-pathogen matching-rules engines, and pharmacokinetic-monitoring rules engines. CONCLUSION: The use of clinical pharmacy informatics in patient care in acute care hospitals with at least 100 beds was significantly more likely when a pharmacy informatics specialist was present in the pharmacy. However, 4 in 10 hospital pharmacies did not employ a pharmacy informatics specialist.

Social care informatics - the missing partner in ehealth.

To the individual, social care can be an essential part of maintaining health, as is reflected by the WHO definition of health as being one of wellbeing. However, health informatics currently narrowly restricts itself to health organizations' activities. Digital records in social care are increasing, raising the need to recognize the area of social care informatics. This new domain needs support and nurture, whilst the delivery of social and related care needs to be harmonized with healthcare delivery. In turn, this raises important new issues as to how to best support the citizen, especially when they are dependent, including issues of information sharing, service co-ordination, sharing of meaning and objectives, and of respect for autonomy.