Instruments For Clinical Health Care

Instruments for Clinical Health-Care Research, Third Edition will facilitate researching clinical concepts and variables of interest, and will enhance the focus on linking clinical variable assessment with routine measurement of everyday clinical interventions.

The rapid growth of home health care has raised many unsolved issues and will have consequences that are far too broad for any one group to analyze in their entirety. Yet a major influence on the safety, quality, and effectiveness of home health care will be the set of issues encompassed by the field of human factors research-the discipline of applying what is known about human capabilities and limitations to the design of products, processes, systems, and work environments. To address these challenges, the National Research Council began a multidisciplinary study to examine a diverse range of behavioral and human factors issues resulting from the increasing migration of medical devices, technologies, and care practices into the home. Its goal is to lay the groundwork for a thorough integration of human factors research with the design and implementation of home health care devices, technologies, and practices. On October 1 and 2, 2009, a group of human factors and other experts met to consider a diverse range of behavioral and human factors issues associated with the increasing migration of medical devices, technologies, and care practices into the home. This book is a summary of that workshop, representing the culmination of the first phase of the study.

Guidelines for the clinical practice of medicine have been proposed as the solution to the whole range of current health care problems. This new book presents the first balanced and highly practical view of guidelinesâ€"their strengths, their limitations, and how they can be used most effectively to benefit health care. The volume offers: Recommendations and a proposed framework for strengthening development and use of guidelines. Numerous examples of guidelines. A ready-to-use instrument for assessing the soundness of guidelines. Six case studies exploring issues involved when practitioners use guidelines on a daily basis. With a real-world outlook, the volume reviews efforts by agencies and organizations to disseminate guidelines and examines how well guidelines are functioningâ€"exploring issues such as patient information, liability, costs, computerization, and the adaptation of national guidelines to local needs.

This book explains all of the stages involved in developingmedical devices; from concept to medical approval including systemengineering, bioinstrumentation design, signal processing,electronics, software and ICT with Cloud and e-Healthdevelopment. Medical Instrument Design and Development offers a comprehensivetheoretical background with extensive use of diagrams, graphics andtables (around 400 throughout the book). The book explains how thetheory is translated into industrial medical products using amarket-sold Electrocardiograph disclosed in its design by the GammaCardio Soft manufacturer. The sequence of the chapters reflects the product developmentlifecycle. Each chapter is focused on a specific University courseand is divided into two sections: theory and implementation. Thetheory sections explain the main concepts and principles whichremain valid across technological evolutions of medicalinstrumentation. The Implementation sections show how the theory istranslated into a medical product. The Electrocardiograph(ECG or EKG) is used as an example as it is a suitable device toexplore to fully understand medical instrumentation since it issufficiently simple but encompasses all the main areas involved indeveloping medical electronic equipment. Key Features: Introduces a system-level approach to product design Covers topics such as bioinstrumentation, signal processing,information theory, electronics, software, firmware, telemedicine,e-Health and medical device certification Explains how to use theory to implement a market product (usingECG as an example) Examines the design and applications of main medicalinstruments Details the additional know-how required for productimplementation: business context, system design, projectmanagement, intellectual property rights, product life cycle,etc. Includes an accompanying website with the design of thecertified ECG product (ahref="http://www.gammacardiosoft.it/book"www.gammacardiosoft.it/book/a) Discloses the details of a marketed ECG Product (from GammaCardio Soft) compliant with the ANSI standard AAMI EC 11under open licenses (GNU GPL, Creative Common) This book is written for biomedical engineering courses(upper-level undergraduate and graduate students) and for engineersinterested in medical instrumentation/device design with acomprehensive and interdisciplinary system perspective.

This volume, developed by the Observatory together with OECD, provides an overall conceptual framework for understanding and applying strategies aimed at improving quality of care. Crucially, it summarizes available evidence on different quality strategies and provides recommendations for their implementation. This book is intended to help policy-makers to understand concepts of quality and to support them to evaluate single strategies and combinations of strategies.