Publications by authors named "Ciaran McInerney"
Purpose: Assessing the long-term impact of cancer on people's lives is challenging due to confounding issues such as aging and comorbidities. We aimed to investigate this impact by comparing the outcomes of cancer survivors with a matched control cohort.
Methods: This was a cross-sectional survey of breast, colorectal and ovarian cancer survivors approximately 5 years post-diagnosis and a cohort of age, sex and social deprivation-matched controls who had never had a cancer diagnosis.
Implementing an artificial intelligence command centre in the NHS: a mixed-methods study.
Health Soc Care Deliv Res
October 2024
Article Synopsis
- The Bradford Royal Infirmary trialed a hospital command centre that uses digital technologies to enhance patient flow and safety, aiming to gather data on its effectiveness for future UK implementation.
- A mixed-methods study compared operational data from Bradford Royal Infirmary and Huddersfield Royal Infirmary, involving interviews and observations of 36 staff members to assess the command centre’s impact on patient care.
- Results showed improved staff confidence in operational control, with some tensions around decision-making and challenges in measuring the direct impact, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Article Synopsis
- In developed countries, hospitals have been testing command centres over the past six years to enhance efficiency and patient care; this study examines their effects at the Bradford Royal Infirmary's A&E Department from January 2018 to August 2021.
- While patient flow improved slightly (up to 9.7 minutes reduction in waiting times), there were notable increases in time from treatment to consultation (up to 53.4 minutes), and the length of patient stays remained largely unchanged.
- Data quality issues persisted, with significant proportions of records missing treatment and assessment dates, indicating that while some improvements were observed, major challenges still exist in overall patient flow and data accuracy.
Tactical positioning is essential for success in short-track speed skating as the race format (direct, head-to-head competition over multiple laps) prioritises finishing position over finishing time. Despite this, current research into tactical positioning treats the race's laps as discrete, independent events. Accordingly, the aggregate metrics used to summarise each lap's tactical positioning behaviour do not allow us to explore the sequential nature of the data, e.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFArticle Synopsis
- Command centres in hospitals have been studied for their effects on patient safety, but no comprehensive evaluations existed prior to this research.
- A study at two hospitals in the UK utilized a retrospective analysis to assess the impact of command centres on patient outcomes from 2018 to 2021, revealing marginal improvements in mortality and readmissions but no significant changes in postoperative sepsis rates.
- The results indicated minor positive impacts on patient safety in the intervention hospital, but similar trends appeared in a control hospital, suggesting more research is needed to evaluate the true effects of command centres on various patient safety outcomes.
Article Synopsis
- - *Oesophago-gastric cancer is hard to diagnose early due to non-specific symptoms; researchers believe machine learning can enhance diagnosis by analyzing electronic health records.* - *Using a dataset from the UK, five machine learning classifiers were developed, with Logistic Regression, Support Vector Machine, and Extreme Gradient Boosted Decision Trees showing the best accuracy and ability to detect cancer.* - *The machine learning models not only identified more cancer cases than the existing UK risk-assessment tool but did so with a low increase in false positives, suggesting potential for better early diagnosis and improved survival rates.*
Patient Safety Informatics: Meeting the Challenges of Emerging Digital Health.
Stud Health Technol Inform
June 2022
Article Synopsis
- The fourth industrial revolution emphasizes the integration of cyber-physical systems and connected devices, raising concerns about patient safety as digital health technologies become more widespread.
- A workshop identified six key patient safety challenges linked to emerging digital health technologies and proposed recommendations to tackle these issues.
- Addressing these challenges requires an interdisciplinary approach that combines social, technical, and regulatory aspects of patient safety informatics, promoting proactive and systemic strategies for improved health outcomes.
In short-track speed skating, tactical positioning is essential for success as the race format (head-to-head) prioritises finishing position over finishing time. At present, our understanding of this phenomenon is based on measuring the similarity between athletes' intermediate and final rankings. However, as this approach groups athlete performances across races, each lap's estimate of tactical importance ignores the athlete-opponent interactions specific to each race.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIntroduction: More people are living with and beyond a cancer diagnosis. There is limited understanding of the long-term effects of cancer and cancer treatment on quality of life and personal and household finances when compared to people without cancer. In a separate protocol we have proposed to link de-identified data from electronic primary care and hospital records for a large population of cancer survivors and matched controls.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFArticle Synopsis
- This study evaluates a new real-time hospital command centre in the UK, aiming to improve decision-making and patient safety in healthcare delivery.
- It employs a mixed-methods approach, combining interviews, ethnographic observations, and quantitative analysis of health records to assess the impact of this complex intervention.
- The research is ethically approved and results will be shared through academic publications and ongoing communications with local health stakeholders.
Disease trajectories model patterns of disease over time and can be mined by extracting diagnosis codes from electronic health records (EHR). Process mining provides a mature set of methods and tools that has been used to mine care pathways using event data from EHRs and could be applied to disease trajectories. This paper presents a literature review on process mining related to mining disease trajectories using EHRs.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAre Regulations Safe? Reflections From Developing a Digital Cancer Decision-Support Tool.
JCO Clin Cancer Inform
March 2021
Article Synopsis
- The study examines the effectiveness of existing regulations for medical devices, particularly those related to informatics solutions for early cancer diagnosis in primary care, highlighting potential gaps in patient safety.
- A computerized cancer risk assessment tool was developed, revealing that current regulations often favor hardware over software, and lack the flexibility needed for ongoing innovation and learning.
- The authors propose nine recommendations aimed at improving these regulations by adopting a system-based perspective that better addresses the complex nature of healthcare and enhances patient safety.
Using a Multi-Level Process Comparison for Process Change Analysis in Cancer Pathways.
Int J Environ Res Public Health
October 2020
Article Synopsis
- The paper addresses the need to analyze how healthcare processes change over time, particularly to meet individual patient needs.
- It introduces a structured approach that examines changes at three levels: holistic (overall process), middle (specific traces), and detailed (individual activities).
- A case study on cancer pathways in Leeds illustrates this approach, revealing multiple change points and emphasizing its value in fostering discussions among experts when contradictions arise in the findings.