Background: Adverse medicine events (AMEs) are unintended effects that occur following administration of medicines. Up to 70% of AMEs are not reported to, and hence remain undetected by, health care professionals and only 6% of AMEs are reported to regulators. Increased reporting by consumers, health care professionals, and pharmaceutical companies to medicine regulatory authorities is needed to increase the safety of medicines.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Medicine-related symptom assessment tools have been developed to assist healthcare professionals in detecting potential medicine-related symptoms. This systematic review aimed to identify and evaluate the measurement properties of medicine-related symptom assessment tools.
Method: A systematic search was conducted in Ovid Medline, Ovid Embase, Ovid PsychInfo, and SCOPUS databases up to March 16, 2024.
Stud Health Technol Inform
January 2024
Natural disasters and health emergencies disproportionally affect vulnerable populations causing disruptions to usual care and increasing chronic disease burden. Data and digital technologies are important tools to identify and mitigate indirect effects of emergencies. In this paper, we describe the methods used in the development of a series of digital emergency preparedness interventions to mitigate the direct and indirect consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic in the veteran community in Australia.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFJ Telemed Telecare
October 2023
Introduction: This study aimed to identify opportunities for clinical decision support targeting medication safety in remote primary care, by investigating the relationship between clinical workflows, health system priorities, cognitive tasks, and reasoning processes in the context of medicines used in people with chronic kidney disease (CKD).
Methods: This qualitative study involved one-on-one, semistructured interviews. The participants were healthcare professionals employed in a clinical or managerial capacity with clinical work experience in a remote health setting for at least 1 year.
Aims: To explore stakeholders' perceptions of a facilitator's role in supporting carers when embedding iSupport for Dementia psychoeducation program, in care services.
Methods: A qualitative descriptive study design was applied. Data were collected from workshops and interviews with carers of people living with dementia (PLWD)and with health and social care professionals from two tertiary hospitals and two community aged care organisations across three Australian states between October 2021 and March 2022.
Background: Objective measures for screening, prioritizing, and planning care for frail individuals are essential for appropriate aged care provision. This study evaluates metrics derived from actigraphy measures (captured by wrist accelerometer) as a digital biomarker to identify frail individuals at risk of adverse outcomes, including death, hospitalization, and cognitive decline.
Methods: This was a secondary study using data from a randomized controlled trial assessing the effectiveness of an ongoing pharmacist service in residential aged care facilities.
Objectives: Large population-based studies examining frailty trajectory found a linear increase in frailty over time. The pattern in which frailty changes over time for an individual person is less well-described. We examined the frailty trajectory of older adults living in aged-care in Australia.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: The majority of people with dementia are cared for by their family members. However, family carers are often unprepared for their caring roles, receiving less education and support compared with professional carers. The consequences are their reduced mental and physical health and wellbeing, and that of care recipients.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAge Ageing
April 2022
Objective: To assess the effectiveness of a pharmacist-led intervention using validated tools to reduce medicine-induced deterioration and adverse reactions.
Design And Setting: Multicenter, open-label parallel randomised controlled trial involving 39 Australian aged-care facilities.
Participants: Residents on ≥4 medicines or ≥1 anticholinergic or sedative medicine.
Background: Digital technologies can enable rapid targeted delivery of audit and feedback interventions at scale. Few studies have evaluated how mode of delivery affects clinical professional behavior change and none have assessed the feasibility of such an initiative at a national scale.
Objective: The aim of this study was to develop and evaluate the effect of audit and feedback by digital versus postal (letter) mode of delivery on primary care physician behavior.
Background: Dementia is a global public health priority with an estimated prevalence of 150 million by 2050, nearly two-thirds of whom will live in the Asia-Pacific region. Dementia creates significant care needs for people with the disease, their families, and carers. iSupport is a self-help platform developed by the World Health Organization (WHO) to provide education, skills training, and support to dementia carers.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Low adherence to real-world online weight loss interventions reduces long-term efficacy. Baseline characteristics and use patterns are determinants of long-term adherence, but we lack cohesive models to guide how to adapt interventions to users' needs. We also lack information whether very early use patterns (24 hours) help describe users and predict interventions they would benefit from.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: The effect of computer- or human-delivered personalized feedback on the effectivess of web-based behavior change platforms for weight loss is unclear.
Objective: We aimed to compare the effectiveness of a web-based behavior change intervention personalized through either computerized or human-delivered feedback with a nonpersonalized intervention in promoting weight loss in community-based adults with overweight or obesity.
Methods: This pragmatic, 3-group, parallel-arm, randomized trial recruited students and staff in a Brazilian public university who were aged 18 to 60 years, had a BMI of ≥25 kg/m, and were not pregnant.
Objective: Educational, and audit and feedback interventions are effective in promoting health professional behaviour change and evidence adoption. However, we lack evidence to pinpoint which particular features make them most effective. Our objective is to identify determinants of quality in professional behaviour change interventions, as perceived by participants.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIntroduction: Many medicines have adverse effects which are difficult to detect and frequently go unrecognised. Pharmacist monitoring of changes in signs and symptoms of these adverse effects, which we describe as medicine-induced deterioration, may reduce the risk of developing frailty. The aim of this trial is to determine the effectiveness of a 12-month pharmacist service compared with usual care in reducing medicine-induced deterioration, frailty and adverse reactions in older people living in aged-care facilities in Australia.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAdherence determines the impact of digital health interventions. Standard tools provide a measure for user experience and predict adherence. We evaluated the User Engagement Scale Short Form (UES-SF) during the POEmaS project, a randomized clinical trial of an online weight loss platform.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFSelf-reported anthropometric data in web-based weight loss interventions may be inaccurate. We studied the agreement between online self-reported and measured weight in the course of the POEmaS randomized controlled trial. Measured weight was not different from reported one (-0.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Obesity is a highly prevalent condition with important health implications. Face-to-face interventions to treat obesity demand a large number of human resources and time, generating a great burden to individuals and health system. In this context, the internet is an attractive tool for delivering weight loss programs due to anonymity, 24-hour-accessibility, scalability, and reachability associated with Web-based programs.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIntroduction: Behaviour change is a key point in weight management. Digital health interventions are attractive tools to deliver behaviour interventions for weight loss, due to the potential to reach a large number of people. We aimed to report how the Behaviour Change Wheel (BCW) was used to develop and implement a web platform to promote weight loss in Brazilian adults with overweight and obesity.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Biomedical processes can provide essential information about the (mal-) functioning of an organism and are thus frequently represented in biomedical terminologies and ontologies, including the GO Biological Process branch. These processes often need to be described and categorised in terms of their attributes, such as rates or regularities. The adequate representation of such process attributes has been a contentious issue in bio-ontologies recently; and domain ontologies have correspondingly developed ad hoc workarounds that compromise interoperability and logical consistency.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFWorld-wide availability of biobank samples is a great desideratum for biomedical researchers. We describe the use case of biobank information retrieval that requires the semantic descriptions of biobank samples and of clinical information. In addition we sketch the foundations of an ontology for biobanks, as a basis on which distributed biobank indexing and retrieval systems can be built.
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