A pilot study is one of the essential stages in a research project. This paper aims to describe the importance of and steps involved in executing a pilot study by using an example of a descriptive study in primary care. The process of testing the feasibility of the project proposal, recruitment of subjects, research tool and data analysis was reported. We conclude that a pilot study is necessar...

"This article reviews the experience of two pilot projects in Bangladesh that have addressed the question of how [operations] research can be designed to foster its utilization. In a rural field experiment [begun in 1972] in Matlab subdistrict, research has demonstrated that contraceptive services, if carefully designed and properly implemented, can influence demographic dynamics even where so...

Colecta-PALM is a Web-based application delivered on PDAs that provides behavioral messaging based on risk assessment responses for HIV patients. Usability testing was undertaken with 15 people living with HIV.AIDS (PWLHA) in two clinics in Lima. Sixty percent (9/15) were somewhat/very satisfied with Colecta-PALM, with usefulness rated 3.7/5. Users found the tool innovative, interesting, easy t...

One of the key roles of a junior doctor is co-ordinating the care of their patients and communicating with different departments or specialties within the hospital. To do this, junior doctors often spend a lot of time on a daily basis contacting the hospital switchboard in order to locate a required bleep/extension/fax number, or trying to navigate an intranet based directory which can be diffi...

BACKGROUND Community service-learning (CSL) has been proposed as one way to enrich medical and dental students' sense of social responsibility toward people who are marginalized in society. AIM We developed and implemented a new CSL option in the integrated medical/dental curriculum and assessed its educational impact. METHODS Focus groups, individual open-ended interviews, and a survey wer...

INTRODUCTION This article is part of the Focus Theme of METHODs of Information in Medicine on "Managing Interoperability and Complexity in Health Systems". BACKGROUND SALUS project aims at building an interoperability platform and a dedicated toolkit to enable secondary use of electronic health records (EHR) data for post marketing drug surveillance. An important component of this toolkit is ...

Human vision supports both the conscious perception of objects (e.g., identifying a tea cup) and the control of visually guided action on objects (e.g., reaching for a tea cup). The distinction between these two functions is supported by neuroanatomy, neuropsychology, animal lesion studies, psychophysics and kinematics in healthy humans, as well as in overarching theories of the visual brain. Y...

Entities -people, organizations, locations and the like -have long been a central focus of natural language processing technology development, since entities convey essential content in human languages. For multilingual systems, accurate translation of named entities and their descriptors is critical. LDC produced Entity Translation pilot data to support the ACE ET 2007 Evaluation and the curre...