SEARCH · Search PubMed
Search indexed PubMed citations on genomics, clinical trials, systematic reviews and public health. Explore titles, authors and supplied subject terms, then open the PubMed record.
Quote a phrase for an exact phrase match. Source license links do not imply unrestricted reuse.
This article presents a case study describing how Saint Francis Care developed its strategy for using the Internet and e-commerce. Planning strategies are discussed, as are implementation plans and expected benefits.
Accounting is inextricably linked with daily professional practice and commerce. No individual, organization, or business can survive without some understanding of the basic concepts of accounting. Having knowledge of fundamental concepts of accounting will relieve some of the pressures imposed by governmental regulatory agencies and legislative requirements, and assist healthcare workers in operating more effectively and competing more successfully.
In today's booming economy, the experienced development professional is being asked to take a more active role in the management of the organization. Not only is the development professional required to raise money in the traditional sense, but she is also being asked to create programs that will raise money in cyberspace, develop e-commerce ventures and product lines.
Many non-profits are looking at ways that they can leverage the Internet to assist in fund raising. Some organizations are using the Internet as a form of e-commerce to accept online gifts, while others are using the immediacy of the Internet for online auctions.
OBJECTIVE: To describe changes in condom use among prostitutes enrolled in a prospective cohort study in Alicante (Spain), and to identify those factors associated with changes in this behaviour. METHODS: Data from this study come from a prospective cohort study of women working at prostitution enrolled in a center for AIDS preventive at Alicante from 1986 to 1996. The proportion of condom use by prostitutes with their clients was recorded during the first visit and the last one, and changes in condom use were estimated as the difference between them. Two logistic regression analyses were done to identify those factors associated with positive or negative changes in condom use. RESULTS: A statistically significant increase in the prevalence of condom use was observed between the first, 69,2%, and the last visit, 83,9% (p < 0,001). Prostitutes working private increased the condom use more than five time than those working in clubs or at the street. The higher the follow-up time the higher the prevalence of condom user, OR > 6 years = 7,6 (95% CI: 2,2-26,0). No variable was associated with a negative change in condom use. CONCLUSION: This study shows an overall increase of condom use in a cohort of prostitutes after 10 years of follow-up. Relapse in risk behavior has been infrequent. In the future, preventive strategies to increase the use of condoms among prostitutes should be adapted to the new forms of sexual commerce.
Tiliacore dinklagei (Menispermaceae), a woody climber of the rain forests of West Africa, has been used as a native medicinal and an article of commerce. Chromatography of an ethanolic extract of the powdered roots afforded the three alkaloids tiliacorinine, funiferine and nortiliacorinine A; the new alkaloid, tiliageine and the incompletely characterized alkaloid, TD-2.
Telemedicine has the potential to transform the world of health care just as the Internet transformed the world of commerce. Ms. Daly examines two legal obstacles to expanding the use of telemedicine: licensure and liability. She defines telemedicine and discusses its common applications and significant benefits. Licensure laws and liability rules result in formidable barriers to the expanded use of telemedicine, while also failing to provide sufficient protection for consumers. Ms. Daly argues that for the benefits of telemedicine to reach those most in need, mutual recognition of licensing laws coupled with a universal standard of care is necessary.
The trend towards reuse of effluent for land application of domestic and industrial wastewater is driven by the need to maximise limited water resources and benefit from the plant nutrients available in the effluent. Of significant impact upon the value of the wastewater for reuse is its chemical properties as well as biochemical oxygen demand and suspended solids. While the sewage treatment plant is expected to treat all wastewater received to a minimum environmental standard, no efforts are given to reducing the chemical load derived from uses of chemicals in the domestic household. That the regulation of industry and commerce far exceeds those of the combined effects of thousands of household is remiss of environmental regulators. This paper examines the results of research into the more common sources of chemical additives to the wastewater stream. Twenty five potable water supplies are examined for their salt load, 20 liquid and 40 powder laundry detergents and five dishwashing products were used to simulate discharges to the sewer, measured for their phosphorus, salt and sodium concentrations. The results of the research indicate that choices in the products available for general use within the house can be made only where product labelling and consumer education is improved. Technical improvements in wastewater treatment are not the answer. The improvement in effluent quality will have significant beneficial effects upon land application areas and expand the range of reuse options available for commercial operations.
The Supreme Court's recent decisions in United States v. Lopez and United States v. Morrison articulate a vision of federalism under which Congress's regulatory authority under the Commerce Clause is severely limited in favor of returning traditional areas of state concern, particularly criminal law enforcement, to local or state control. The Court's decisions in these cases coincide with ballot initiatives legalizing the medical use of marijuana garnering a majority of the vote in California, Arizona, Alaska, Colorado, Nevada, Oregon, Washington, Maine, and Washington D.C. Those who use marijuana for medical purposes under sanction of state law, however, still face the threat of federal prosecution under the Controlled Substances Act. Medical marijuana proponents have traditionally, and unsuccessfully, contested federal prosecution using individual rights arguments under theories of equal protection or substantive due process. This Comment argues that after Lopez and Morrison, the federal government's authority to regulate intrastate use of marijuana for medicinal purposes is not the foregone conclusion it once was. The author suggests that proponents of medical marijuana use should invoke the federalism arguments of Lopez and Morrison and argue for state legislative independence from the federal government on this issue.
This paper provides a regional commentary on the progress of deinstitutionalization in an era of restructuring in New Zealand. The commentary focuses on the Waikato region, where the transition to community-based psychiatric care has been underway since the announcement of the closure of Tokanui Hospital in 1993. We use media reports to construct a narrative illuminating the distinctive threads of alternative discourse on the re-placing of people with mental health problems and sites of treatment 'into the community'. Our interpretation of this local narrative is cast against a series of backdrops: firstly, we provide an abbreviated history of deinstitutionalization in New Zealand; secondly, we examine mental health care as a sector within a rapidly evolving health system; and, thirdly, we reflect on the implementation of community mental health care in a re-regulated civil society. We argue that the effective implementation of community care has been hampered by the lack of concerted policy in the mental health care sector, by a fiscal squeeze on the health care system and by the impingement of non-health care legislation (the Commerce Act, the Privacy Act and the Resource Management Act) on the local expression and management of community care. In the Waikato narrative, we also identify administrative practices that have recast people with mental health problems as criminals and re-established prisons as the site of treatment. We conclude that the media in New Zealand have a role that extends beyond simply reporting on events. Indeed, the media act as a reflexive conduit; journalists interpret issues and through their 'stories' help to shape the course of events.
The invention of RAM in Manchester, UK, in 1948 and the subsequent commercial production of computers paved the way for their wide-spread use in industry and commerce. This Paper details the problems and the successes as computers were introduced into the UK National Health Service. It covers the computers and their uses and lists also the personnel involved. On a broader front it sets the UK scene against the wider international scene, again mentioning those other pioneers elsewhere in the world. It should bring a sense of nostalgia to some and helpful advice to those countries about to go down a similar road.
The digital signature is a key technology in the forthcoming Internet society for electronic healthcare as well as for electronic commerce. Efficient exchanges of authorized information with a digital signature in healthcare information networks require a construction of a public key infrastructure (PKI). In order to introduce a PKI to healthcare information networks in Japan, we proposed a development of a user authentication system based on a PKI for user management, user authentication and privilege management of healthcare information systems. In this paper, we describe the design of the user authentication system and its implementation. The user authentication system provides a certification authority service and a privilege management service while it is comprised of a user authentication client and user authentication serves. It is designed on a basis of an X.509 PKI and is implemented with using OpenSSL and OpenLDAP. It was incorporated into the financial information management system for the national university hospitals and has been successfully working for about one year. The hospitals plan to use it as a user authentication method for their whole healthcare information systems. One implementation of the system is free to the national university hospitals with permission of the Japanese Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology. Another implementation is open to the other healthcare institutes by support of the Medical Information System Development Center (MEDIS-DC). We are moving forward to a nation-wide construction of a PKI for healthcare information networks based on it.
As in any new field, the merger of medicine, e-commerce and the Internet raises many questions pertaining to ethical conduct. Key issues include defining the essence of the patient-provider relationship, establishing guidelines and training for practicing online medicine and therapy, setting standards for ethical online research, determining guidelines for providing quality healthcare information and requiring ethical conduct for medical and health websites. Physicians who follow their professional code of ethics are obligated not to exploit the relationship they have with patients, nor allow anyone else working with them to do so. Physicians and therapists are obligated to serve those who place trust in them for treatment, whether in face-to-face or online Internet encounters with patients or clients. This ethical responsibility to patients and clients is often in direct conflict with the business model of generating profits. Healthcare professionals involved in Medical Internet Ethics need to define the scope of competent medical and healthcare on the Internet. The emerging ethical issues facing medicine on the Internet, the current state of medical ethics on the Internet and questions for future directions of study in this evolving field are reviewed in this paper.
The documents concern the following topics: the studies performed by the Italian Ministry of Agriculture, Industry and Commerce between 1870 and 1890 on the causes of unhealthiness of the lands around Rome and the methods to remove them, i.e. irrigation canals and agricultural transformations; the role played by the General Direction of the Land reclamation of the Ministry of Agriculture and Forests from 1929 in the realization of the interventions of hydraulic and antianopheles reclamation address to modify the environmental conditions, and in the realization of assistants services and antimalaria prophylaxis in the reclamation zones.
In the middle of the nineteenth century, vegetable products were the most important raw material for the pharmaceutical industry. That industry was a "pharmacist-industry" and the quality of their products was defined in the official pharmacopoeias. Eisso Post Stheeman was one of these pharmacists and although he was a producer of medicines he stayed a pharmacist between pharmacists. He communicated with them about the quality of medicines in terms of pureness, identity and preparation. His successor, Sypko Stheeman, went into his fathers steps. He too was primarily a pharmacist; only after that a producer of (vegetable) drugs. Still there was a difference between them. Sypko focussed more on commerce and production of medicines. To that end price-lists were published from 1878 onwards. These price-lists became an important medium of communication between manufacturer and pharmacist. The introduction of the steam engine in 1894 represents a turning-point. Steam energy made many new activities possible, and the production of medicines and dispensation forms became possible on a much larger scale. The development that had set in with the introduction of steam energy was completed in the years between 1901 and 1914. Production of medicines grew enormously, but an important renewal was the production of tablets. Millions of them left the factory in Meppel every day. At the same time, the firm strived to give each of the produced medicines its own identity. Brocades and Stheeman not only introduced "specialities", but chemical drugs, produced by others, were being marketed under the label of B S as well. Gradually, the standard of pharmacist-quality had been replaced by Broacades and Stheeman-quality.
The contents of the macrominerals Na, K, Ca, Mg, and P and the microminerals Fe, Zn, Cu, Mn, Sn and Ni, present in 44 samples of natural or fruits yogurts, of 9 different brands, available in the commerce of São Paulo State, Brazil, were evaluated. Acid digestion assisted by microwave and the determination of the elements by inductively coupled argon plasma atomic emission spectrometry (ICP-OES) were employed. The results showed that the yogurts are good sources of Ca, P and K, reasonable sources of Na, Mg and Fe, and poor sources of Zn and Cu. The multivariate analysis showed non-significant differences among the brands and the flavors studied.
Individual countries have traditionally reserved to their own competent national or regional authorities the responsibility for supervising medical practice and dealing with healthcare providers who fall below acceptable standards of care, competency or professional conduct. But the use of information and communication technologies to practice medicine across the borders of sovereign States will--just as e-commerce challenges the conventional regulation of trade--create new dangers and new challenges for the individuals and organisations that are responsible for supervising and regulating the practice of medicine. A workable scheme for co-operation between national competent authorities may therefore be required if both health professionals and patient-citizens are to be properly protected in an era of cross-border practice using telemedicine.
In the wake of the Internet, E-commerce, and particularly the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, data security has risen to the top of health care information technology priorities. What is the correct mix of data security tools, policies, and technologies for the doctor, the hospital, the insurer, the vendor, and everyone else who does business in the health care industry?