Health informatics started to evolve decades ago with the intention to support healthcare using computers. Since then Electronic health records (EHRs) and personal health records (PHRs) have become available but widespread adoption was limited by lack of interoperability and security issues. This paper discusses the feasibility of interoperable standards based EHRs and PHRs drawing on experienc...

OBJECTIVE To assess factors related to use and non-use of a sophisticated interactive preventive health record (IPHR) designed to promote uptake of 18 recommended clinical preventive services; little is known about how patients want to use or be engaged by such advanced information tools. DESIGN Descriptive and interpretive qualitative analysis of transcripts and field notes from focus groups...

A number of applications based on personal health records (PHRs) are emerging in the field of health care and wellness. PHRs empower patients by giving them control over their health data. Health data for PHRs can be supplied by patients, wellness providers and health care providers. Health care providers may use the PHRs to provide medical care. Unfortunately, the quality of the health data in...

conclusions geographic accessibility of pharmacies at night and on holidays has to be addressed by provincial health policymakers. materials and methods the analysis was based on straight-line distance measurements. we considered 150, 300, 450, 600, and 750 m for pedestrians, and 1, 2, and 3 km for driving accessibility as the acceptable distances. we calculated the number and percentage of hou...

The adoption of PDAs (Personal Digital Assistants) with mobile communication capability has the potential to improve work practice and efficiency in the health care sector. Ambulatory care workers, particularly, might welcome the prospect of point of care availability and capture of client information. A key factor in the lack of adoption of such systems, is that traditionally, health care info...

The population of the world is ageing rapidly. By 2050, the population aged 85 and over will be three times more than it is now. This phenomenon has caused several issues in the current health service system, especially workforce shortages in the health sector and a lack of space in aged care facilities (ACFs). In the face of these issues, home-based and community-based healthcare services have...

Recent studies [1][2] use mobile phones as data aggregators of body area networks. To better support body network applications, mobile phones can also utilize cloud services. In this paper, we explore the opportunities to design and develop personal health care applications with cloud services. Specifically, relay service, rendezvous service, speech to text service, and other web services are i...

BACKGROUND The Nepal Demographic Health Survey (NDHS) in 2006 showed that more than half (56%) of the women with sexually transmitted infections (STIs), including HIV, in Nepal sought sexual health services. There is no such data for female sex workers (FSWs) and the limited studies on this group suggest they do not even use routine health services. This study explores FSWs use of sexual health...

background in early 1990s, tanzania like other african countries, adopted health sector reform (hsr). the most strongly held centralisation system that informed the nature of services provision including health was, thus, disintegrated giving rise to decentralisation system. it was within the realm of hsr process, user fees were introduced in the health sector. along with user fees, various typ...