background and purpose: nosocomial infections, especially those occurring in intensive care units (icus), are one of the major health problems in every community. nosocomial infections are associated with increased mortality rate and high treatment costs. effective control of these infections essentially depends on the knowledge of healthcare providers regarding the detection and eradication of...

True success of Serious Games depends on consumers' realization of the inherent value of those products for various self-efficacy applications in life. Additionally, there exist numerous challenges for Serious Games developers from a market perspective including smaller consumer audiences, higher development cost, the need for embedded evaluation and assessment functionality, as well as insuffi...

Demographic change and the evolving demands on healthcare systems, especially in the provision of healthcare and long-term care for a growing number of older people, are among the greatest social challenges of the next decades.[...].

BACKGROUND As in many European countries, undocumented migrants in Denmark have restricted access to healthcare. The aim of this study is to describe and analyse undocumented migrants' experiences of access to healthcare, use of alternative health-seeking strategies; and ER nurses' experiences in encounters with undocumented migrants. METHODS Qualitative design using semi-structured interview...

Email communication between patients and healthcare providers is gaining popularity. However, healthcare providers are concerned about being inundated with patient messages and their inability to respond to messages in a timely manner. This work provides automated text mining decision support to overcome some of the challenges presented by email communication between patients and healthcare pro...

Despite many perceived benefits from accessing and exchanging patient information across healthcare providers (HCPs), the adoption of healthcare information exchanges (HIEs) has been slow. Numerous efforts related to the implementation of HIEs are typically focused on consolidation of data within a region or a network, and have resulted in a growing number of HIEs implemented at different level...

The healthcare industry is changing, posing challenges to Medicare-certified home healthcare agencies (HHAs). With healthcare reform and the 2011 prospective payment system changes, including reduction in reimbursement to agencies, it is imperative to assess an organization's wound care program. HHAs must provide quality care at lower costs, using evidence-based medicine that may include nontra...

One of the challenges faced nowadays by the healthcare industry is semantic interoperability. It is the ability of a healthcare system to share information and have that information properly interpreted by the receiving system in the same sense as intended by the transmitting system. Semantic Web (aka Web 3.0) provides the enabling technologies to achieve semantic interoperability. Web Services...

Delivery of healthcare services presents many challenges for governments in most developing countries. Some of these challenges include financial and human resources issues that might affect governments’ ability to manage and transform scarce resources to meet healthcare needs. Telemedicine, a healthcare delivery technology where physicians examine patients from distant locations using informat...

Medical science has made revolutionary changes in the past decades. Contemporaneously however, healthcare has made incremental changes at best. The growing discrepancy between the revolutionary changes in medicine and the minimal changes in healthcare processes is leading to inefficient and ineffective healthcare deliver and one if not the significant contributor to the exponentially increasing...