Coalescing medical systems: A challenge for health informatics
- Authors: Stranieri, Andrew , Vaughan, Stephen
- Date: 2010
- Type: Text , Conference paper
- Relation: Global Telehealth - Selected Papers from Global Telehealth 2010 (GT2010) – 15th International Conference of the International Society for Telemedicine and eHealth and 1st National Conference of the Australasian Telehealth Society
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- Description: Patients in many nations increasingly access diverse medical systems including Western medicine, Traditional Chinese Medicine, Homeopathy and Ayervedic medicine as globalisation advances. The trend toward co-existence of medical systems presents challenges for health informatics including the need to develop standards that can encompass the diversity required, the need to develop software applications that effectively inter-operate across diverse systems and the need to support patients when evaluating competing systems. This article advances the notion that the challenges can most effectively be met with the development of informatics approaches that do not assume the superiority of one medical system over another. Argument visualization to support patient decision making in selecting an appropriate medical system is presented as an application that exemplifies this stance
Decision support based needs assessment for cancer patients
- Authors: Stranieri, Andrew , Kulkarni, Siddhivinayak , Macfadyen, Alyx , Love, Anthony , Vaughan, Stephen
- Date: 2011
- Type: Text , Conference paper
- Relation: Australasian workshop on health informatics and knowledge management (HIKM)
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- Description: Regular assessment of wellness or quality of life for patients throughout a cancer journey is important so as to identify aspects of life that could lead to distress and impede recovery or acceptance. The emerging trends in assessment are to deploy validated, quality of life instruments on touchscreen computers in medical waiting rooms. However, these add to workload of health care professionals and can be impersonal for patients to use. In this article, an alternate approach is presented that involves a decision support system with natural dialogue that elicits the patient's specific context in a far finer grained manner than is possible with questionnaire based instruments. The system includes a model of heuristics that health care professionals in a locality use to make inferences regarding a patient's quality of life and avenues for referral.
- Description: E1
Informatics to support patient choice between diverse medical systems C3 - 2014 IEEE 16th International Conference on e-Health Networking, Applications and Services, Healthcom 2014
- Authors: Golden, Isaac , Stranieri, Andrew , Sahama, Tony , Pilapitiya, Senaka , Siribaddana, Sisira , Vaughan, Stephen
- Date: 2014
- Type: Text , Conference proceedings
- Full Text: false
- Description: Culturally, philosophically and religiously diverse medical systems including Western medicine, Traditional Chinese Medicine, Ayurvedic Medicine and Homeopathic Medicine, once situated in places and times relatively unconnected from each other, currently co-exist to a point where patients must choose which system to consult. These decisions require comparative analyses, yet the divergence in key underpinning assumptions is so great that comparisons cannot easily be made. However, diverse medical systems can be meaningfully juxtaposed for the purpose of making practical decisions if relevant information is presented appropriately. Information regarding privacy provisions inherent in the typical practice of each medical system is an important element in this juxtaposition. In this paper the information needs of patients making decisions regarding the selection of a medical system, are examined.