AIMS Good end-of-life communication and decision-making are important to patients with advanced heart failure (HF) and their families, but their needs remain unmet. In this pilot study, we describe the feasibility and performance of a novel questionnaire aimed at identifying barriers and solutions to improve communication and decision-making about goals of care for hospitalized patients with ad...

The design of authentication methods raises crucial questions on how to solve conflicts between security and usability goals, that are at opposite ends of a "see-saw". As a matter of fact, the usability of security systems has become a major issue in research on the efficiency and user acceptance of security systems. An authentication is more strong as more tokens are involved in authentication...

This paper adds to research on girls' growing educational advantage by examining gender differences in career paths. Using baseline data from an intervention study (TRY-IT!) targeting 265 sixth-graders in Title I schools, our research traces adolescent career aspirations by gender, race and class. Additionally, we investigate whether girls and boys exhibit differential sensitivity to environmen...

The usability of user interfaces is crucial for the success of an application. Model driven user interface (UI) development speeds up the production of UIs and improves the maintainability of UIs. However, the usability evaluation of UIs is usually conducted by end-users or experts after UIs are generated. Such a user centric evaluation is usually time consuming and expensive, especially when t...

Model-driven user interface development environments and their associated methodologies have evolved over time to become more explicit, flexible, and reusable but they still lack to reach a level that allows tailoring a method to the reality of software development organizations and their projects. In order to address this shortcoming, method engineering provides strategies to define and tailor...

IMPORTANCE Seriously ill hospitalized patients have identified communication and decision making about goals of care as high priorities for quality improvement in end-of-life care. Interventions to improve care are more likely to succeed if tailored to existing barriers. OBJECTIVE To determine, from the perspective of hospital-based clinicians, (1) barriers impeding communication and decision...

Restructured health care reimbursement systems and new requirements for nonprofit hospitals are transforming the U.S. health system, creating opportunities for enhanced integration of public health and health care goals. This article explores the role of public health practitioners and lawyers in this moment of transformation. We argue that the population perspective and structural strategies t...