Publications | Digital Health

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

Publications2020, citizen engagement, co-production, ehealth, health systems research, integrated people-centred health services, primary care, public participation, social determinants of health, social entrepreneurship, universal health coverage

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.

Publications2020, data-linkage, infectious disease, pathogenomics, public deliberation, public health surveillance, social licence

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.

Publications2020, SR, systematic review, UTI

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.

Publications2020, automation, databases, search strategies, systematic reviews

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

Chen J, Lyell D, Laranjo L, Magrabi F. Effect of Speech Recognition on Problem Solving and Recall in Consumer Digital Health Tasks: Controlled Laboratory Experiment. J Med Internet Res 2020;22(6):e14827 doi: 10.2196/14827[published Online First: Epub Date]

Publications2020, speech recognition software; consumer health informatics; ergonomics

Background: Recent advances in natural language processing and artificial intelligence have led to widespread adoption of speech recognition technologies. In consumer health applications, speech recognition is usually applied to support interactions with conversational agents for data collection, decision support, and patient monitoring. However, little is known about the use of speech recognition in consumer health

Akbar S, Coiera, Enrico, Magrabi F. Safety concerns with consumer-facing mobile health applications and their consequences: a scoping review. Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association. 2019; 27(2):330-40.

Publications2020, mHealth; mobile applications; consumer health information; patient safety

Objective To summarize the research literature about safety concerns with consumer-facing health apps and their consequences. Materials and Methods We searched bibliographic databases including PubMed, Web of Science, Scopus, and Cochrane libraries from January 2013 to May 2019 for articles about health apps. Descriptive information about safety concerns and consequences were extracted and classified into

Yang Y, Walker TM, Walker AS, Wilson DJ, Peto TEA, Crook DW, Shamout F; CRyPTIC Consortium, Zhu T, Clifton DA. DeepAMR for predicting co-occurent resistance of Mycobacterium tuberculosis. Bioinformatics 2019;35(18):3240-3249.

Publications2019, anti-tuberculosis drugs, antibiotic resistance, TB

Motivation: Resistance co-occurrence within first-line anti-tuberculosis (TB) drugs is a common phenomenon. Existing methods based on genetic data analysis of Mycobacterium tuberculosis (MTB) have been able to predict resistance of MTB to individual drugs, but have not considered the resistance co-occurrence and cannot capture latent structure of genomic data that corresponds to lineages. Results: We

Vo K, Jonnagaddala J and Liaw ST. Statistical supervised meta-ensemble algorithm for medical record linkage. J Biomed Inform. (online publication). 2019. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jbi.2019.103220

Publications2019, continuous care, ensemble strategies, multiple care facilities, patient data

Identifying unique patients across multiple care facilities or services is a major challenge in providing continuous care and undertaking health research. Identifying and linking patients without compromising privacy and security is an emerging issue in the big data era. The large quantity and complexity of the patient data emphasize the need for effective linkage methods

O’Connor AM, Tsafnat G, Gilbert SB, Thayer KA, Shemilt I, Thomas J, Glasziou P, Wolfe MS. Still moving toward automation of the systematic review process: a summary of discussions at the third meeting of the International Collaboration for Automation of Systematic Reviews (ICASR). Systematic Reviews. 2019; 8(1):57.

Publications2019, automation, data abstraction, data extraction, evidence synthesis, priority ranking, systematic review, tools

The third meeting of the International Collaboration for Automation of Systematic Reviews (ICASR) was held 17–18 October 2017 in London, England. ICASR is an interdisciplinary group whose goal is to maximize the use of technology for conducting rapid, accurate, and efficient systematic reviews of scientific evidence. The group seeks to facilitate the development and widespread

Liyanage H, Liaw ST, Jonnagaddala J, et al. Artificial Intelligence in Primary Health Care: Perceptions, Issues, and Challenges. Yearbook of Medical Informatics 2019. http://dx.doi.org/10.1055/s-0039-1677901

Publications2019, artificial intelligence, clinical decision, PHC, primary health care

Background: Artificial intelligence (AI) is heralded as an approach that might augment or substitute for the limited processing power of the human brain of primary health care (PHC) professionals. However, there are concerns that AI-mediated decisions may be hard to validate and challenge, or may result in rogue decisions. Objective: To form consensus about perceptions,

Lau AYS, Staccini P; Artificial Intelligence in Health: New Opportunities, Challenges, and Practical Implications. Section Editors for the IMIA Yearbook Section on Education and Consumer Health Informatics. Yearb Med Inform. 2019 Aug;28(1):174-178. doi: 10.1055/s-0039-1677935. Epub 2019 Aug 16.

Publications2019, artificial intelligence, consumer, consumer informatics, machine learning, participatory health, patient, social media

Objectives : To summarise the state of the art during the year 2018 in consumer health informatics and education, with a special emphasis on the special topic of the International Medical Informatics Association (IMIA) Yearbook for 2019: “Artificial intelligence in health: new opportunities, challenges, and practical implications”. Methods : We conducted a systematic search of

Hunt M, Bradley P, Lapierre SG, Heys S, Thomsit M, Hall MB, Malone KM, Wintringer P, Walker TM, Cirillo DM, Comas I, Farhat MR, Fowler P, Gardy J, Ismail N, Kohl TA, Mathys V, Merker M, Niemann S, Omar SV, Sintchenko V, Smith G, van Soolingen D, Supply P, Tahseen S, Wilcox M, Arandjelovic I, Peto TEA, Crook DW, Iqbal Z. Antibiotic resistance prediction for Mycobacterium tuberculosis from genome sequence data with Mykrobe. Wellcome Open Res. 2019 Dec 2;4:191. doi: 10.12688/wellcomeopenres.15603.1. PMID: 32055708; PMCID: PMC7004237.

Publications2019, antimicrobial resistance; antibiotic treatment; diagnostic; nanopore; tuberculosis; whole genome sequencing

Two billion people are infected with Mycobacterium tuberculosis, leading to 10 million new cases of active tuberculosis and 1.5 million deaths annually. Universal access to drug susceptibility testing (DST) has become a World Health Organization priority. We previously developed a software tool, Mykrobe predictor, which provided offline species identification and drug resistance predictions for M.

Guo GN, Jonnagaddala J, Farshid S, Huser V, Reich C, & Liaw ST. Comparison of the cohort selection performance of Australian Medicines Terminology to Anatomical Therapeutic Chemical mappings. JAMIA 2019. doi:10.1093/jamia/ocz143

Publications2019, Australian Medicines Terminology; anatomical therapeutic chemical classification; clinical trials; cohort selection; electronic health records

Objective: Electronic health records are increasingly utilized for observational and clinical research. Identification of cohorts using electronic health records is an important step in this process. Previous studies largely focused on the methods of cohort selection, but there is little evidence on the impact of underlying vocabularies and mappings between vocabularies used for cohort selection.

Denecke K, Gabarron E, Grainger R, Konstantinidis ST, Lau A, Rivera-Romero O, Miron-Shatz T, Merolli M. Artificial Intelligence for Participatory Health: Applications, Impact, and Future Implications. Yearb Med Inform. 2019 Aug;28(1):165-173. doi: 10.1055/s-0039-1677902. Epub 2019 Apr 25.

Publications2019, AI, artificial intelligence, clinical trials, health informatics, participatory health

Objective: Artificial intelligence (AI) provides people and professionals working in the field of participatory health informatics an opportunity to derive robust insights from a variety of online sources. The objective of this paper is to identify current state of the art and application areas of AI in the context of participatory health. Methods: A search

Liyanage H; Liaw ST; Konstantara E; Mold F; Schreiber R; Kuziemsky C; Terry AL; de Lusignan S. ‘Benefit-risk of Patients’ Online Access to their Medical Records: Consensus Exercise of an International Expert Group’, Yearbook of Medical Informatics 2018, vol. 27, pp. 156–162; DOI http://dx.doi.org/10.1055/s-0038-1641202

Publications2018, computerised - privacy - confidentiality - general practice - Delphi technique - patients' access to records, medical record systems

Background: Patients’ access to their computerised medical records (CMRs) is a legal right in many countries. However, little is reported about the benefit-risk associated with patients’ online access to their CMRs. Objective: To conduct a consensus exercise to assess the impact of patients’ online access to their CMRs on the quality of care as defined in six