Challenges and opportunities for telehealth in the management of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease: a qualitative case study in Greece.

Background: Telehealth (TH) was introduced as a promising tool to support integrated care for the management of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD). It aims at improving self-management and providing remote support for continuous disease management. However, it is often not clear how TH-supported services fit into existing pathways for COPD management.

Evaluation of integrated care services in Catalonia: population-based and service-based real-life deployment protocols.

Background: Comprehensive assessment of integrated care deployment constitutes a major challenge to ensure quality, sustainability and transferability of both healthcare policies and services in the transition toward a coordinated service delivery scenario. To this end, the manuscript articulates four different protocols aiming at assessing large-scale implementation of integrated care, which are being developed within the umbrella of the regional project Nextcare (2016-2019), undertaken to foster innovation in technologically-supported services for chronic multimorbid patients in Catalonia (ES) (7.5 M inhabitants).

Telehealth for patients with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD): a systematic review and meta-analysis protocol.

Introduction: Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) is a highly prevalent chronic disease characterised by persistent respiratory symptoms. A focus of COPD interventional studies is directed towards prevention of exacerbations leading to hospital readmissions. Telehealth as a method of remote patient monitoring and care delivery may be implemented to reduce hospital readmissions and improve self-management of disease.

Learning Healthcare Systems: Scaling-Up Integrated Care Programs.

Current healthcare systems are struggling with rising costs and unbalanced quality of care. Integrated care (IC) is a worldwide trend in healthcare reforms designed to tackle these problems. ACT@Scale is a partnership of leading European regions, industry and academia which aims to identify, transfer and scale-up existing integrated healthcare practices.

Proposals for enhanced health risk assessment and stratification in an integrated care scenario.

Objectives: Population-based health risk assessment and stratification are considered highly relevant for large-scale implementation of integrated care by facilitating services design and case identification. The principal objective of the study was to analyse five health-risk assessment strategies and health indicators used in the five regions participating in the Advancing Care Coordination and Telehealth Deployment (ACT) programme (http://www.act-programme.

A data model to support the evaluation of coordinating care EU programmes in the context of the ACT programme.

Advancing Care Coordination and Telehealth Deployment (ACT) is a European Union (EU) project, completed last October, which has developed a framework for evaluating and improving pioneering health care programs regarding coordinating care and telehealth (CC & TH) across specific EU regions. In this paper we present the key design decisions of the project's data model and the challenges faced. We focus on the definition of the multi-dimensional indicators in order to overcome data incompleteness and heterogeneity issues.

A computational infrastructure for evaluating Care-Coordination and Telehealth services in Europe.

This paper presents the computational framework that is employed for the analysis of health related key drivers and indicators within ACT, a project aiming to improve the deployment of Care Coordination and Telehealth services/programmes across Europe, through an iterative evidence collection-evaluation-refinement process. An open-source solution is proposed, combining a series of established software technologies. The paper focuses on technical aspects of the framework and presents a worked example of a usage scenario.

Process mining techniques: an application to stroke care.

In a competitive health-care market, hospitals have to focus on ways to streamline their processes in order to deliver high quality care while at the same time reducing costs. To accomplish this goal, hospital managers need a thorough understanding of the actual processes. Diffusion of Information and Communication Technology tools within hospitals, such as electronic clinical charts, computerized guidelines and, more generally, decision support systems, make huge collections of data available, not only for data analysis, but also for process analysis.

Hyaluronidase enhances the activity of adriamycin in breast cancer models in vitro and in vivo.

The effect of hyaluronidase and a combination of hyaluronidase with Adriamycin was investigated on several breast cancer models in vitro and in vivo. In vitro enzyme treatment (using concentrations up to 80,000 IU/1) of murine (MXT-, MXT +/-, and MXT+) and human (MCF-7, ZR-75-1 and T-47-D) breast cancer cell lines did not inhibit tumour cell proliferation (measured by a kinetic crystal violet assay) in either case. Although high-dose hyaluronidase (1.

[Phenyketonuria associated with Rubinstein-Taybi syndrome, spondylic dysplasia, left vascular shrinking of adrenal gland (author's transl)].

Report of a 10 year old girl, who demonstrated the following diseases independent from each other: Phenylketonuria, Rubinstein-Taybi syndrome, dysplasias of the skeleton, especially dysplasia of the vertebra and finally, left-sided shrinkes adrenal gland, which caused presumably an increased production of androgens with a premature pubarche.

[Alport syndrom (author's transl)].

A deaf-and-dumb patient died at the age of ten of failure of the kidneys. An uncle of the boy died at the age of 42, an aunt at the age of 16 years, both of atrophic kidneys. The mother of the proband is suffering from hard hearing on one side and recurrent episodes of pyuria.

[Seckel syndrom (author's transl)].

Report of a girl, aged twenty-one months with the typical symptoms of the Seckel Syndrom: Low initial weight in spite of normal resp. prolonged pregnancy, characteristical "bird headed face", mikrocephaly, shortening, general dystrophy, stato-motorial and mental retardation.

[Bilateral aplasia of the proximal part of fibula (author's transl)].

Report of an infant with aplasia of the proximal part of the fibula on both sides; by our knowledge the second observation in the literature. Furthermore the infant shows an aplasia of the thyroidea, a coarctation of the aorta, an atrial septal defect and an intraperitoneally situated ascending as well as descending colon.

[Congenital spondylo-epiphyseal dysplasia: follow-up of a case over 9 years (author's transl)].

A girl with the symptoms of dysplasia spondyloepiphysaria congenita has been observed during 9 years. The progressively severe alterations of the skeleton are demonstrated and briefly discussed.