Prediction of the increase in health services demand based on the analysis of reasons of calls received by a customer relationship management.

Currently, customer relationship management (CRM) tools are very important in our society because they provide a comunication channel to the healthcare system for patients. Salud Responde is a CRM that provides many health services for the entire population of Andalusia, in southern Spain. The number and frequenzy of phone calls received change along the year. They depend on many factors, such as weekdays, seasons, vaccination campaigns, environmental factors, pandemic periods, etc. All these are the main reasons number of health calls changes along the year. This variability makes that the current management of resources for offering emergency services based on historical data is inefficient. The factors, which influence the phone calls along the year, are different from one period to another. Therefore, it is clear to demand an improved in the current management system. In this context, the main goal for this research is to develop an expert system able to identify and analyze, using different data mining algorithms, the most relevant factors to predict the variability of health service demand. Thus, here, it is proposed a methodology in which using reasons calls received in the CRM as input data, it is possible to predict in advance the healthcare resources demand.

Virtual reality-based therapy for chronic low back and neck pain: a systematic review with meta-analysis.

Purpose: To compile all the scientific evidence available to date to evaluate the effect of virtual reality based therapy (VRBT) on reducing pain intensity, kinesiophobia, and associated disability, and on increasing the hr-QoL in patients with chronic neck pain (CNP) or chronic low back pain (CLBP). Methods: Studies published in PubMed Medline, SCOPUS, Web of Science, CINAHL Complete, and Physiotherapy Evidence Database (PEDro) up to June 2023 were searched. All searches followed the PICOS Framework. Two authors independently screened the studies found in the searches. Any differences of opinion regarding the selection of studies were settled by a third author. Results: Twenty-five RCTs, published between 2013 and 2022, providing data from 1261 patients (20 RCTs) with CLBP and 261 patients (five RCTs) with CNP, were included. In reducing pain intensity for patients with CLBP, meta-analyses showed that VRBT is effective in reducing pain just to the end of the intervention, and this effect could be maintained 1 and 6 months after the therapy. Conclusion: VRBT was found to be better than therapeutic exercise (TE), sham, and no intervention (NI), showing a major effect when VRBT was used as a complementary therapy to conventional physiotherapy (CPT). Further, VRBT showed an immediate effect and immersive VRBT was the most adequate VRBT modality in reducing pain in CNP patients. No differences were found between non-immersive VRBT and immersive VRBT in reducing pain, kinesiophobia, disability, and hr-QoL in patients with CLBP.