Service, quality, efficiency

GOAL: Boarding emergency department (ED) patients is associated with reductions in quality of care, patient safety and experience, and ED operational efficiency. However, ED boarding is ultimately reflective of inefficiencies in hospital capacity management. The ability of a hospital to accommodate variability in patient flow presumably affects its financial performance, but this relationship is not well studied. We investigated the relationship between ED boarding and hospital financial performance measures...

In recent years, China medical and health services have made great development. However, the management of nursing human resources in operating room of primary hospitals still faces a series of challenges. In the nursing work of operating room, high-quality nursing human resource management is important for improving the efficiency of operating room and ensuring the safety of patients. From January 2022 to December 2022, comprehensive collaborative scheduling and quantitative scoring evaluation methods were carried out in our hospital, and relevant data were collected...

Addressing the psychiatric aspects of serious illness in palliative care (PC) is crucial to both care delivery and outcomes. Psychiatric comorbidities are common among patients with PC needs and can significantly impact their total burden of symptomatic distress, overall quality of life, functional independence, and healthcare utilization. Yet, these aspects of care are often deferred to mental health consultant teams in the context of busy PC services and often limited human resources. To provide comprehensive and person-centered care, PC clinicians must understand the interplay between medical conditions and psychiatric presentations within a biopsychosocial framework to respond empathically, efficiently, and effectively...

BACKGROUND: Assisted index case testing (ICT), in which health care workers take an active role in referring at-risk contacts of people living with HIV for HIV testing services, has been widely recognized as an evidence-based intervention with high potential to increase status awareness in people living with HIV. While the available evidence from eastern and southern Africa suggests that assisted ICT can be an effective, efficient, cost-effective, acceptable, and low-risk strategy to implement in the region, it reveals that feasibility barriers to implementation exist...

Ecosystems, biodiversity, and the human population all depend on a quality or uncontaminated environment. Quality environment provides people and wildlife access to nutrition, medications, dietary supplements, and other ecosystem services. The conservation of biodiversity-that is, species richness, abundance, heredities, and diversity-as well as the control of climate change are facilitated by such an uncontaminated environment. However, these advantages are jeopardized by newly emerging environmental chemical contaminants (EECCs) brought on by increased industrialization and urbanization...

BACKGROUND: Many digital health interventions (DHIs), including mobile health (mHealth) apps, aim to improve both client outcomes and efficiency like electronic medical record systems (EMRS). Although interoperability is the gold standard, it is also complex and costly, requiring technical expertise, stakeholder permissions, and sustained funding. Manual data linkage processes are commonly used to "integrate" across systems and allow for assessment of DHI impact, a best practice, before further investment...

This systematic review and meta-analysis aimed to evaluate the impact of prospective payment systems (PPSs) on cholecystectomy. A comprehensive literature review was conducted, examining studies published until December 2023. The review process focused on identifying research across major databases that reported critical outcomes such as length of stay (LOS), mortality, complications, admissions, readmissions, and costs following PPS for cholecystectomy. The studies were specifically selected for their relevance to the impact of PPS or the transition from fee-for-service (FFS) to PPS...

Polygenic scores (PGS) enable the prediction of genetic predisposition for a wide range of traits and diseases by calculating the weighted sum of allele dosages for genetic variants associated with the trait or disease in question. Present approaches for calculating PGS from genotypes are often inefficient and labor-intensive, limiting transferability into clinical applications. Here, we present 'Imputation Server PGS', an extension of the Michigan Imputation Server designed to automate a standardized calculation of polygenic scores based on imputed genotypes...

The banking sector is increasingly recognising the need to implement robo-advisory. The introduction of this service may lead to increased efficiency of banks, improved quality of customer service, and a strengthened image of banks as innovative institutions. Robo-advisory uses data relating to customers, their behaviors and preferences obtained by banks from various communication channels. In the research carried out in the work, an attempt was made to obtain an answer to the question whether the data collected by banks can also be used to determine the degree of consumer interest in this type of service...

UNLABELLED: The private sector has emerged as a crucial source of maternal, newborn, and child health (MNCH) care in many low- and middle-income countries (LMICs). Quality within the MNCH private sector varies and has not been established systematically. This study systematically reviews findings on private-sector delivery of quality MNCH care in LMICs through the six domains of quality care (QoC) (i.e., efficiency, equity, effectiveness, people-centered care, safety, and timeliness)...

INTRODUCTION: Organ donation is a life-saving intervention that provides hope for patients with end-stage organ failure, improving their longevity and quality of life. However, the demand for organs far exceeds the supply, leading to a significant disparity between patients on transplant waiting lists and the availability of suitable organs. To address this issue, innovative strategies, such as uncontrolled donation after circulatory death (uDCD) programs, have been proposed to expand the donor pool to the prehospital setting...

OBJECTIVE: To explore the effects of comprehensive nursing combined with thermal insulation measures on the awakening agitation (EA) of cesarean section parturient under general anesthesia and maternal and infant safety. METHODS: A total of 136 cesarean section parturients under general anesthesia admitted in our hospital from May 2020 to November 2023 were picked as the research objects following the random, double-blind method. All patients have no mental illness and can clearly reflect their physical state...

BACKGROUND: The global evolution of pre-hospital care systems faces dynamic challenges, particularly in multinational settings. Machine learning (ML) techniques enable the exploration of deeply embedded data patterns for improved patient care and resource optimisation. This study's objective was to accurately predict cases that necessitated transportation versus those that did not, using ML techniques, thereby facilitating efficient resource allocation. METHODS: ML algorithms were utilised to predict patient transport decisions in a Middle Eastern national pre-hospital emergency medical care provider...

BACKGROUND: Self-scheduling of medical visits is becoming available at many medical institutions. We aimed to examine the self-scheduled visit counts and rate of growth of self-scheduled visits in a multispecialty practice. METHODS: For 85 weeks extending from January 1, 2022 through August 24, 2023, we examined self-scheduled visit counts for over 1500 self-scheduled visit types. We compared completed self-scheduled visit counts to all scheduled completed visit counts for the same visit types...

Road dust is a demonstrated source of urban air pollution. Given this, the implementation of street sweeping strategies that effectively limit road dust accumulation and resuspension should be a public health priority. Research examining the effectiveness of street sweeping for road dust removal in support of good air quality has been limited to date. To address this, the study aimed to assess the use of a regenerative-air street sweeper to efficiently remove road dust particles and metal(loid)s in size fractions relevant for respiratory exposure in Toronto, Canada...

OBJECTIVES: To explore the potential of artificial intelligence (AI) to assist prescription determination for orthokeratology (OK) lenses. METHODS: Artificial intelligence algorithm development followed by a real-world trial. A total of 11,502 OK lenses fitting records collected from seven clinical environments covering major brands. Records were randomly divided in a three-way data split. Cross-validation was used to identify the most accurate algorithm, followed by an evaluation using an independent test data set...

OBJECTIVE: The purpose of this study was to implement a 2-phase approach to rapidly increase the number of annual wellness visits (AWVs) and build a sustainable model at 3 study units (Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, and clinics in 2 regions of Mayo Clinic Health System), which collectively serve approximately 80 000 patients who qualify for an AWV annually. METHODS: In the rapid improvement phase, beginning in July 2022, goals at the facilities were reoriented to prioritize AWVs, educate staff on existing AWV resources, and create low-effort workflows so that AWVs could be incorporated into existing patient appointments...

Pre-hospital emergency medical service (EMS) tasks often come with complex and diverse noise interferences, posing challenges in implementing ASR-based medical technologies and hindering efficient and accurate telephonic communication. Among the different types of noise distortion, interfering speech is especially annoying. To address these issues, our aim is to develop a technology capable of extracting the intended speech content of the target physician from noisy and mixed audio during EMS tasks. In this work, we propose a monoaural personalized speech enhancement (PSE) method called pDenoiser, which is a real-time neural network that operates in the time domain...

Global mental health services face challenges such as stigma and a shortage of trained professionals, particularly in low- and middle-income countries, which hinder access to high-quality care. Mobile health interventions, commonly referred to as mHealth, have shown to have the capacity to confront and solve most of the challenges within mental health services. This paper conducted a comprehensive investigation in 2024 to identify all review studies published between 2000 and 2024 that investigate the advantages of mHealth in mental health services...

There is always a contradiction between the limited health resources and the unlimited demand of the population for health services, and only by improving the productivity of health resources can the health level of the population be improved as much as possible. Using prefecture-level administrative regions as spatial units, the paper analyzes the spatial pattern and changes of health productivity of health resources in China from 2000 to 2010, and uses a spatial panel Tobit model to examine the effects of factors such as technical level of health institutions, health service accessibility, public health policies and ecological environment quality on health productivity of health resources...