Improving quality of service of home healthcare units with health information technologies.

Deployment of health information technologies (HITs) provides home care units with the means to generate improvements in accuracy and timeliness of information required to meet dynamic patient demands and provide high quality patient care. Increasing availability of information can also facilitate organisational learning, which leads to the invocation of processes that result in improved responses and decisions. This study examined crucial links between HITs and quality of service provided through an empirical investigation of 252 patients in a hospital-in-the-home unit (HHU) in a Spanish regional hospital.

An application of the Hospital-in-the-Home unlearning context.

Many researchers who have investigated health care organizations have indicated that health care professionals are replete with outdated knowledge, and some researchers go even further to argue that without the presence of a context that facilitates unlearning (forgetting) practitioners may lose the ability to recognize relevant changes with respect to knowledge pertaining to all aspects of the health care sector and they may decide to rely on potentially out-of-date knowledge and inappropriate ways of interpreting data with attendant loss of decision quality and attendant risks. This article presents an analysis and develops a model of the factors that influence unlearning which is focused on the health care industry and is comprised of three constituent components: (1) a framework characterizing the lens through which individuals view situations; (2) a framework for characterizing how individual habits change; and (3) a framework for characterizing the manner in which emergent understandings are consolidated into existing knowledge and knowledge structures. The model was developed and analyzed using qualitative data from the Hospital-in-the-Home Unit of a Spanish Regional Hospital.

Linking national contexts with intellectual capital: a comparison between Spain and Morocco.

The 'national environment', which includes belief and value systems, shapes the way individuals, groups and organisations perceive the world around them and determines how they react to ongoing changes. This paper analyses the role of different context's effects on intellectual capital by means of an empirical investigation of 112 Small to Medium sized Enterprises (SMEs) in the Spanish and Moroccan telecommunication industries. Within the investigation, repeated ANOVA were used, which were validated by factor analysis.

Effect of atorvastatin and diet on non-alcoholic fatty liver disease activity score in hyperlipidemic chickens.

Non-alcoholic steatohepatitis (NASH) is part of the spectrum of non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD), which includes from simple steatosis and steatohepatitis, to the most severe cirrhosis and carcinoma, which develops in the absence of excessive alcohol intake. NAFLD is the most common liver disorder in affluent societies. There is no proven treatment for NAFLD/NASH.

Effects of nifedipine, verapamil and diltiazem on serum biochemical parameters and aortic composition of atherosclerotic chickens.

Calcium appears to be involved in many of the cellular events, which are thought to be important in atherogenesis. In this study, we examine the effects of three calcium entry blockers (nifedipine, verapamil, and diltiazem at clinical and higher doses) on serum biochemical parameters and aortic calcium, cholesterol and triglyceride concentrations of atherosclerotic egg-fed chickens. All egg-fed chickens (treated and non-treated) showed an increase in serum total cholesterol, LDL-cholesterol and triglycerides without significant effect when calcium entry blockers were used.