[This corrects the article DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFImportance: Discussions about goals of care are important for high-quality palliative care yet are often lacking for hospitalized older patients with serious illness.
Objective: To evaluate a communication-priming intervention to promote goals-of-care discussions between clinicians and hospitalized older patients with serious illness.
Design, Setting, And Participants: A pragmatic, randomized clinical trial of a clinician-facing communication-priming intervention vs usual care was conducted at 3 US hospitals within 1 health care system, including a university, county, and community hospital.
Objective: Healthcare facilities in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs), especially in Africa, suffer from a lack of continuous bedside monitoring capability, adversely affecting timely detection of hemodynamic deterioration and the opportunity for life-saving intervention. Wearable device technologies can overcome many of the challenges of conventional bedside monitors and could be viable alternatives. We assessed clinicians' perspectives on the use of a novel experimental wearable device ("biosensor") to improve bedside monitoring of pediatric patients in two West African LMICs.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Lassa fever (LF), a haemorrhagic illness caused by the Lassa fever virus (LASV), is endemic in West Africa and causes 5000 fatalities every year. The true prevalence and incidence rates of LF are unknown as infections are often asymptomatic, clinical presentations are varied, and surveillance systems are not robust. The aim of the Enable Lassa research programme is to estimate the incidences of LASV infection and LF disease in five West African countries.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFImportance: Many clinical trial outcomes are documented in free-text electronic health records (EHRs), making manual data collection costly and infeasible at scale. Natural language processing (NLP) is a promising approach for measuring such outcomes efficiently, but ignoring NLP-related misclassification may lead to underpowered studies.
Objective: To evaluate the performance, feasibility, and power implications of using NLP to measure the primary outcome of EHR-documented goals-of-care discussions in a pragmatic randomized clinical trial of a communication intervention.