Biomedical subjects

Christian Lovis

Publications and source records attributed to Christian Lovis.

25 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

PubMed2003

A frame-based representation of ICD-10.

UNLABELLED: Physicians are required to code information concerning a patient's stay in order to measure the medical activity in hospitals. They use the International Statistical Classification of Diseases and Related Health Problems, Tenth Revision (ICD-10). Coding is usually performed manually and computerized tools may be useful in speeding up and facilitating the tedious task of coding patient information. The aim of this work is to build a surface semantic model of ICD-10 in order to ameliorate a coding help system. METHODS: This work was focused on chapter XI of the ICD-10, Diseases of the Digestive System. Each term from both analytical and alphabetical indexes about this chapter were submitted to a morphological analysis in order to extract the medical concepts within. After a statistical analysis of these concepts and the way they connect themselves, a semantic model based on a "semantic frame" approach was built. RESULTS: Although this model could represent a reasonable amount of medical knowledge within chapter XI of the ICD-10 in a quite satisfactory way, it shows lack of efficiency for some other chapters. CONCLUSION: Difficulties have to be overcome when modelling a classification meant for manual utilisation, and a lot of work still has to be done to obtain an effective coding help system using the ICD-10.

Forms and Records Control↗

PubMed2003

Nursing care nomenclatures: real implementation in the computerized patient care record.

We report our experience in the conception and the use of a detailed nursing care documentation electronic record. This nursing care record is completely nomenclature driven, including the user-interface. International nomenclatures or classifications such as NANDA are used. They have been translated to French and their language adopted to the local practice habits. This nursing CPR is used in nineteen wards in the five campuses of the University Hospitals of Geneva, covering a broad range of nursing care types, such as acute adult and paediatric care, surgery, general internal medicine, geriatrics, in- and outpatient psychiatry and long-term rehabilitation. This paper focuses on the problematic of the use of nomenclatures and classification in a nursing daily practice, particularly the social and behavioural challenges that had to be faced. The rationale behind the use of these nomenclatures is presented. We present some of the techniques that have been used to make a nomenclature-driven nursing CPR more attractive for nurses.

Documentation↗

PubMed2003

Telemedicine in Western Africa: lessons learned from a pilot project in Mali, perspectives and recommendations.

OBJECTIVE: to evaluate the feasibility, potential and risks of an internet-based telemedicine network in developing countries of Western Africa. METHODS: a project for the development of a national telemedicine network in Mali was initiated in 2001, using internet-based technologies for distance learning and teleconsultations. RESULTS: the telemedicine network has been in productive use for 12 months and has enabled various collaboration channels, including North-South, South-South, and South-North distance learning and teleconsultations. It also unveiled a set of potential problems: a) limited pertinence of North-South collaborations when there are major differences in available resources or socio-cultural contexts between the collaborating parties; b) risk of induced digital divide if the periphery of the health system is not involved in the development of the network, and c) need for the development of local medical contents management skills. CONCLUSION: the identified risks must be taken into account when designing large-scale telemedicine projects in developing countries and can be mitigated by the fostering of South-South collaboration channels, the use of satellite-based internet connectivity in remote areas, and the valorization of local knowledge and its publication on-line.

Africa, Western↗

PubMed2002

Understanding usage patterns of handheld computers in clinical practice.

Handheld computers are commonly used in clinical practice and often considered invaluable by physicians. Though full of promise, the technology is still costly and literature assessing its real use in clinical practice remains scarce. In an effort to better understand how Personal Digital Assistants (PDA) can be utilized as clinical tools, we designed a study that closely monitored the use of a selection of handheld applications by a cohort of interns in a service of Internal Medicine. Information gathered about actual use of the mobile applications offer valuable insights on usage patterns of tools that promise to be become an important part of our clinical practice in the years to come, and will hopefully help guide future developments.

Computers, Handheld↗

PubMed2002

Implementation of a publication-subscription environment within a multi-agents paradigm.

Information management are workflow are one of the most important challenges to be met in hospitals. This challenge is even more important when having to deal with getting the right information at the right place, including such tools as alerts and notification. Open distributed intelligent agents constitute one of the most promising ways to explore, providing both ability to work in heterogeneous environment, and dealing with highly structured semantic knowledge. The paradigm proposed in this work is to consider a publication/subscription system as collaborative procedures network organized in workflows modelled by Petri nets. Each stage of workflow is carried out by a set of agent units having placed their competences in a workspace with a semantic description. Finally, robustness and tolerance are implicit properties of such agents; two mandatory characteristics of healthcare information systems.

Efficiency, Organizational↗

PubMed2002

Multilingual approach to ICD10: on the need for a source reference database.

The distribution of ICD10 is of concern for thousand of developers in numerous countries. The absence of some basic features to facilitate the transfer and consequently to augment the quality of the delivered version is a constant characteristic. Errors, ambiguities, missing terms, unrecognised attributes are quite common, despite the efforts of some national centres doing their best to fill this gap. For other countries and languages, where such centres do not exist or do not have sufficient resources, this problem is even stronger. A reference ICD database is clearly a need today. The following features are to be made available out of an ICD database: exact count of terms, whether they are systematic, include, exclude or daggers and asterisks pairs, eventually at chapter level; exact count of notes, references and indirect exclusions; recommended structure of relational tables for ICD representation; basic structure of the classification at any level of detail. These features are somewhat language dependant and should be repeated for each one. This paper demonstrates the benefits of publishing such ICD reference information in order to improve the future ICD tools to be developed in numerous countries.

Database Management Systems↗

PubMed2002

XML as standard for communicating in a document-based electronic patient record: a three years experiment.

During the past few years, the eXtensible Markup Language (XML) has experienced a growing use for accessing, representing and exchanging information, especially in the health care environment. This paper discusses the potentials of the use of XML for the electronic patient record (EPR) in two ways: first, as a format for the exchange of structured messages, and second, as a comprehensible way of representing patient documents. These statements rely on a three years experiment conducted at the Geneva University Hospital as part of its document-centred EPR.

Medical Records Systems, Computerized↗