Effect of pooled comparative information on judgments of quality.

Quality assessment is the focus of many health care initiatives. Yet it is not well understood how the type of information used in decision support tools to enable judgments of quality based on data impacts the accuracy, consistency and reliability of judgments made by physicians. Comparative pooled information could allow physicians to judge the quality of their practice by making comparisons to other practices or other specific populations of patients.

Initial clinical validation of Health Heritage, a patient-facing tool for personal and family history collection and cancer risk assessment.

Personal and family health histories remain important independent risk factors for cancer; however they are currently not being well collected or used effectively. Health Heritage was designed to address this need. The purpose of this study was to validate the ability of Health Heritage to identify patients appropriate for further genetic evaluation and to accurately stratify cancer risk.

The Effect of Information Analysis Automation Display Content on Human Judgment Performance in Noisy Environments.

Displaying both the strategy that information analysis automation employs to makes its judgments and variability in the task environment may improve human judgment performance, especially in cases where this variability impacts the judgment performance of the information analysis automation. This work investigated the contribution of providing either information analysis automation strategy information, task environment information, or both, on human judgment performance in a domain where noisy sensor data are used by both the human and the information analysis automation to make judgments. In a simplified air traffic conflict prediction experiment, 32 participants made probability of horizontal conflict judgments under different display content conditions.

Psychophysical Detection of Inclusions with the Bare Finger amidst Softness Differentials.

Softness discrimination and the detection of inclusions are important in surgery and other medical tasks. To better understand how the characteristics of an inclusion (size, depth, hardness) and substrate (stiffness) affect their tactile detection and discrimination with the bare finger, we conducted a psychophysics experiment with eighteen participants. The results indicate that within a more pliant substrate (21 kPa), inclusions of 4 mm diameter (20 mm(3) volume) and greater were consistently detectable (above 75% of the time) but only at a depth of 5 mm.

Characterizing the range of simulated prostate abnormalities palpable by digital rectal examination.

Background: Although the digital rectal exam (DRE) is a common method of screening for prostate cancer and other abnormalities, the limits of ability to perform this hands-on exam are unknown. Perceptible limits are a function of the size, depth, and hardness of abnormalities within a given prostate stiffness.

Methods: To better understand the perceptible limits of the DRE, we conducted a psychophysical study with 18 participants using a custom-built apparatus to simulate prostate tissue and abnormalities of varying size, depth, and hardness.

SUPPORTING PHYSICIANS' PRACTICE-BASED LEARNING AND IMPROVEMENT (PBLI) AND QUALITY IMPROVEMENT THROUGH EXPLORATION OF POPULATION-BASED MEDICAL DATA.

Participating in self-assessment activities may stimulate improvement in practice behaviors. However, it is unclear how best to support the development of self-assessment skills, particularly in the health care domain. Exploration of population-based data is one method to enable health care providers to identify deficiencies in overall practice behavior that can motivate quality improvement initiatives.