Bacterial indicators and bacteriophages suggested as potential indicators of water quality were determined by public laboratories in water from springs, household water wells, and rural and metropolitan water supplies in north-eastern Spain. Indicator bacteria were detected more frequently than bacteriophages in springs, household water wells and rural water supplies. In contrast, positive bact...

The growing concern about Indoor Air-Quality has accelerated the development of small, low-cost air-quality monitoring systems. These systems are capable of monitoring various indoor air pollutants in real time, notifying users about the current air-quality status and gathering the information to the central server. However, most Internet of Things (IoT)-based air-quality monitoring systems num...

The Quality Indicator Survey (QIS) is the most comprehensive regulatory change to the nursing home survey process since the Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1987 (OBRA-87). In this article we describe the policy evolution that led to the QIS, summarize the QIS method and implementation, and profile the QIS survey results. Following over a decade of development, in 2007 the Centers for Medic...

OBJECTIVE The objective of this study is to determine an indicator framework for addiction treatment centres based on the demands of stakeholders and in alignment with the European Foundation for Quality Management (EFQM) Excellence Model. SETTING The setting is the Jellinek Centre based in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, which serves as a prototype for an addiction treatment centre. METHOD Con...

Various evolutionary multiobjective optimization algorithms (EMOAs) have replaced or augmented the notion of dominance with quality indicators and leveraged them in selection operators. Recent studies show that indicator-based EMOAs outperform traditional dominance-based EMOAs. Many quality indicators have been proposed with the intention to capture different preferences in optimization. Theref...

Different approaches to measure the hospital competition index might lead to inconsistent results of the effects of hospital competition on innovation adoption. The purpose of this study is to adopt a different approach to define market area and measure the level of competition to examine whether hospital competition has a positive effect on hospital behavior, taking quality indicator projects ...

PURPOSE To evaluate the concurrent validity of three European sets of drug-specific indicators of prescribing quality METHODS In 200 hip fracture patients (≥65 years), consecutively recruited to a randomized controlled study in Sahlgrenska University Hospital in 2009, quality of drug treatment at study entry was assessed according to a gold standard as well as to three drug-specific indicator...

The Spanish Society of Critical Care Medicine (SEMICYUC) has recently published an updated version of Quality Indicators in Critical Care. Daily sedative interruption is included among them. As this practice is controversial, research studies are revised and guidelines for its implementation are proposed.

BACKGROUND The National Database for Nursing Quality Indicators (NDNQI) was established in 1998 to assist hospitals in monitoring indicators of nursing quality (eg, falls and pressure ulcers). Hospitals participating in NDNQI transmit data from nursing units to an NDNQI data repository. Data are summarized and published in reports that allow participating facilities to compare the results for t...

In the last years, several methodologies for ontology engineering have been proposed. Most of these methodologies guide the engineer from a first paper draft to an implemented – mostly description logics-based – ontology. A quality assessment of how accurately the resulting ontology fits the initial conceptualization and intended application has not been proposed so far. In this paper, we inves...