Objectives: This study describes a computer simulation model that has been developed to explore organizational changes required to improve patient safety based on a medication error reporting system. Methods: Model parameters for the simulation model were estimated from data submitted to the MEDMARX medication error reporting system from 570 healthcare facilities in the U.S. The model

Background and purpose: Information technology such as electronic medical records (EMRs), electronic prescribing and decision support systems are recognized as essential tools in Europe, the U.S., Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. But significant barriers impede widescale adoption of these tools, especially EMR systems. Objectives: The objectives of this study were to investigate the present status of information technology in health care, the perceived benefits and barriers by primary care physicians. Methods: Literature analysis and survey data from primary care physicians on adoption of information technology are reviewed. Results: The U.S. trails European countries as well as Canada, Australia and New Zealand in the use of information technology in primary care. The results of the study indicate that physicians in general perceive benefits to information technology, but also cite major barriers to its implementation in their practices. These barriers include lack of access to capital by health care providers, complex systems and lack of data standards that permit exchange of clinical data, privacy concerns and legal barriers. Conclusions: Overcoming these barriers will require subsidies and performance incentives by payers and government; certification and standardization of vendor applications that permit clinical data exchange; removal of legal barriers; and greater security of medical data to convince practitioners and patients of the value of EMRs.

Patient safety is a critical issue in health care. The Institute of Medicine [1] estimates up to 98,000 hospitalized patients die annually as a result of medical error. Nurses serve as a hospital unit

Current keystroke dynamics applications have tackled the problem of traditional knowledge-based static password verification, but the problem of spontaneous password verification persists. The intent of this study was to examine the predictive strength of typing patterns for spontaneous passwords. The typing patterns of an individual typing at a DELL

Ever since introduction of automated fingerprint recognition in law enforcement in the 1970s it has been utilized in applications ranging from personal authentication to civilian border control. The increasing use of automated fingerprint recognition puts on it a challenge of processing a diverse range of fingerprints. The quality control module is important to this process because it supports consistent fingerprint detail extraction which helps in identification / verification. Inherent feature issues, such as poor ridge flow, and interaction issues, such as inconsistent finger placement, have an impact on captured fingerprint quality, which eventually affects overall system performance. Aging results in loss of collagen; compared to younger skin, aging skin is loose and dry. Decreased skin firmness directly affects the quality of fingerprints acquired by sensors. Medical conditions such as arthritis may affect the user

Policy-based management for federated healthcare systems have recently gained increasing attention due to strict privacy and disclosure rules. While the work on privacy languages and enforcement mechanisms, such as Hippocratic databases, has advanced our understanding of designing privacy-preserving policies for healthcare databases, the need to integrate these policies in practical healthcare framework is becoming acute. Additionally, while most work in this area has been organization-oriented, dealing with exchange of information between healthcare organizations (such as referrals), the requirements for the emerging area of personal healthcare information management have so far not been adequately addressed. These shortcomings arise from the lack of a sophisticated policy specification language and enforcement architecture that can capture the requirement for (i) integration of privacy and disclosure policies with well-known healthcare standards used in the industry in order to specify the precise requirements of a practical healthcare system, and (ii) provision of ubiquitous healthcare services to patients using the same infrastructure that enables federated healthcare management for organizations. In this paper, we have designed a policy-based system to mitigate these concerns. One, we have designed our disclosure and privacy policies using a requirements specification based on a set of use cases for the Clinical Document Architecture (CDA) standard proposed by the community. Two, we present a context-aware policy specification language which allows encoding of CDA-based requirements use-cases into privacy and disclosure policy rules. We have shown that our policy specification language is effective in terms of handling a variety of expressive constraints on CDA-encoded document contents. Our language enables specification of privacy-aware access control for federated healthcare information across organizational boundaries, while the use of contextual constraints allows the incorporation of user and environment context in the access control mechanism for personal healthcare information management. Moreover, the declarative syntax of the policy rules makes the policy adaptable to changes in privacy regulations or patient preferences. We also present an enforcement architecture for the federated healthcare framework proposed in this paper.