November | 2020 | Digital Health

Albarqouni L, Byambasuren, O., Clark, J., Scott, A.M., Looke, DGlasziou, P. Does Copper treating of commonly touched surfaces reduce healthcare acquired infections? A Systematic Review and meta-analysis. Journal of Hospital Infection. (106/4) p765-773, 2020

Background Healthcare-acquired infections (HAIs) cause substantial morbidity and mortality. Copper appears to have strong antimicrobial properties under laboratory conditions. Aim To examine the potential effect of copper treatment of commonly touched surfaces in healthcare facilities. Methods Controlled trials comparing the effect of copper-treated surfaces (furniture or bed linens) in hospital rooms compared with standard rooms

Scott AM, Clark J, Del Mar C, Glasziou P, Increased fluid intake to prevent urinary tract infections: systematic review and meta-analysis. British Journal of General Practice, 70(692), pp.e200-e207.

Background Approximately 15% of community-prescribed antibiotics are used in treating urinary tract infections (UTIs). Increase in antibiotic resistance necessitates considering alternatives. Aim To assess the impact of increased fluid intake in individuals at risk for UTIs, for impact on UTI recurrence (primary outcome), antimicrobial use, and UTI symptoms (secondary outcomes). Design and setting A systematic

Akhtyamova L, Martínez P, Verspoor K, Cardiff J. (2020) Testing Contextualized Word Embeddings to Improve NER in Spanish Clinical Case Narratives. IEEE Access.

In the Big Data era, there is an increasing need to fully exploit and analyze the huge quantity of information available about health. Natural Language Processing (NLP) technologies can contribute by extracting relevant information from unstructured data contained in Electronic Health Records (EHR) such as clinical notes, patients’ discharge summaries and radiology reports. The extracted

Wilson DJ, and The CRyPTIC Consortium. GenomeMap: Within-species genome-wide dn/ds estimation from over 10,000 genomes. Molecular Biology and Evolution 2020;37(8):2450-2460.

The dN/dS ratio provides evidence of adaptation or functional constraint in protein-coding genes by quantifying the relative excess or deficit of amino acid-replacing versus silent nucleotide variation. Inexpensive sequencing promises a better understanding of parameters, such as dN/dS, but analyzing very large data sets poses a major statistical challenge. Here, I introduce genomegaMap for estimating

Staccini P, Lau AYS; Social Media, Research, and Ethics: Does Participant Willingness Matter?. Section Editors for the IMIA Yearbook Section on Consumer Health Informatics and Education. Yearb Med Inform. 2020 Aug;29(1):176-183. doi: 10.1055/s-0040-1702022. Epub 2020 Aug 21.

Objective : To summarise the state of the art published in 2019 in consumer health informatics and education, with a special emphasis on “Ethics and Health Informatics”. Methods : We conducted a systematic search of articles published in PubMed using a predefined set of queries, which identified 368 potential articles for review. These articles were

Sittig DF, Wright A, Coiera E, et al. Current challenges in health information technology-related patient safety. Health Informatics J 2020;26(1):181-89 doi: 10.1177/1460458218814893[published Online First: Epub Date]

We identify and describe nine key, short-term, challenges to help healthcare organizations, health information technology developers, researchers, policymakers, and funders focus their efforts on health information technology-related patient safety. Categorized according to the stage of the health information technology lifecycle where they appear, these challenges relate to (1) developing models, methods, and tools to enable

Rockett RJ, Arnott A, Lam C, Sadsad R, Timms V, Gray K-A, Eden J-S, Chang S, Gall M, Draper J, Sim EM, Bachmann NL, Carter I, Basile K, Byun R, O’Sullivan MV, Chen SCA, Maddocks S, Sorrell TC, Dwyer DE, Holmes EC, Kok J, Prokopenko M, Sintchenko V. Revealing COVID-19 transmission in Australia by SARS-CoV-2 genome sequencing and agent-based modelling. Nature Medicine 2020; 26(9):1398-1404.

In January 2020, a novel betacoronavirus (family Coronaviridae), named severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), was identified as the etiological agent of a cluster of pneumonia cases occurring in Wuhan City, Hubei Province, China1,2. The disease arising from SARS-CoV-2 infection, coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), subsequently spread rapidly causing a worldwide pandemic. Here we examine

Pederson M, Verspoor K, Jenkinson M, Law M, Abbott DF, Jackson GD (2020). Artificial Intelligence for clinical decision support in neurology. Brain Communications.

Artificial intelligence is one of the most exciting methodological shifts in our era. It holds the potential to transform healthcare as we know it, to a system where humans and machines work together to provide better treatment for our patients. It is now clear that cutting edge artificial intelligence models in conjunction with high-quality clinical

Liaw ST, Liyanage H, Kuziemsky C, Terry AL, Schreiber R, Jonnagaddala J, de Lusignan S. Ethical Use of Electronic Health Record Data and Artificial Intelligence: Recommendations of the Primary Care Informatics Working Group of the International Medical Informatics Association. Yearbook of Medical Informatics: Apr 2020

Objective: To create practical recommendations for the curation of routinely collected health data and artificial intelligence (AI) in primary care with a focus on ensuring their ethical use. Methods: We defined data curation as the process of management of data throughout its lifecycle to ensure it can be used into the future. We used a

Jonnagaddala J, Guo GN, Batongbacal S, Marcelo A, Liaw ST. Adoption of enterprise architecture for healthcare in AeHIN member countries. BMJ Health & Care Informatics 2020; 27: e100136. DOI: 10.1136/bmjhci-2020-100136

Background Healthcare organisations are undergoing a major transformational shift in the use of information and digital health technologies. Enterprise architecture (EA) has been incrementally adopted in many healthcare organisations globally to facilitate this change. EA can increase the effectiveness of an organisation’s digital health capabilities and resources. However, little is known about the status of

Godinho MA, Jonnagaddala J, Gudi N, Islam R, Narasimhan P, Liaw ST. mHealth for Integrated People-Centred Health Services in the Western Pacific: A Systematic Review. Int J Med Informatics 2020; 142: 104259. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijmedinf.2020.104259.

Objective This review aimed to examine how mobile health (mHealth) to support integrated people-centred health services has been implemented and evaluated in the World Health Organization (WHO) Western Pacific Region (WPR). Methods Eight scientific databases were searched. Two independent reviewers screened the literature in title and abstract stages, followed by full-text appraisal, data extraction, and

Godinho MA, Ashraf MM, Narasimhan P, Liaw ST. Community Health Alliances as social enterprises that digitally engage citizens and integrate services: a case study in Southwestern Sydney (Protocol). Digital Health 2020; 6: 1-8

South Western Sydney (SWS) is one of the fastest growing regions in the state of New South Wales (Australia). Much of the population live in local government areas (LGAs) with levels of disadvantage higher than the state average, with a predominance of non-communicable and chronic diseases that are typically associated with age-related and behavioural factors.

Degeling C, Carter SM, McAnulty J, Sintchenko V, Braunack-Mayer A, Yarwood T, Johnson J, Gilbert GL. Community perspectives on the benefits and risks of technologically enhanced communicable disease surveillance systems: A report on four community juries. BMC Medical Ethics 2020; 21(1):31.

Background: Outbreaks of infectious disease cause serious and costly health and social problems. Two new technologies – pathogen whole genome sequencing (WGS) and Big Data analytics – promise to improve our capacity to detect and control outbreaks earlier, saving lives and resources. However, routinely using these technologies to capture more detailed and specific personal information

Clark, J., Glasziou, P., Del Mar, C., Bannach-Brown, A., Stehlik, P. and Scott, A.M., 2020. A full systematic review was completed in 2 weeks using automation tools: a case study. Journal of Clinical Epidemiology, 121, pp.81-90.

Background and Objectives: Systematic reviews (SRs) are time and resource intensive, requiring approximately 1 year from protocol registration to submission for publication. Our aim was to describe the process, facilitators, and barriers to completing the first 2-week full SR. Study Design and Setting: We systematically reviewed evidence of the impact of increased fluid intake, on

Clark J, Sanders S, Carter M, Honeyman D, Cleo G, Auld Y, et al. Improving the translation of search strategies using the polyglot search translator: A randomized controlled trial. J Med Libr Assoc. 2020;108(2):195-207.

Background: Searching for studies to include in a systematic review (SR) is a time- and labor-intensive process with searches of multiple databases recommended. To reduce the time spent translating search strings across databases, a tool called the Polyglot Search Translator (PST) was developed. The authors evaluated whether using the PST as a search translation aid