Call for Papers: Special issue on Community Informatics for Health - Journal of Community Informatics

Abstract submissions due 14 March 2011

A special issue of the international Journal of Community Informatics (http://ci-journal.net) is going to be devoted to Health. Community Informatics (CI) is the study and the practice of enabling communities with Information and Communications Technologies (ICTs). This special issue will focus on how the social application of ICTs can empower and enable communities towards improving health. The issue is expected to be published in late 2011. The Journal of Community Informatics is a focal point for the communication of research of interest to a global network of academics, community informatics practitioners and national and multi-lateral policy makers.

The field of community informatics seeks to explore the potential of information and communication technologies and their applications for social and economic development efforts at the community level. It particularly seeks to ensure that marginalized individuals and communities can benefit from the opportunities that ICTs can provide. In the area of health, this is all the more important since those with poorer health status and poorer health outcomes are usually those with less (or no) access to ICTs, or are those who have fewer skills to make use of and benefit from ICTs.

For this special issue of the Journal on Health, we are inviting submission of original, unpublished articles. We welcome research articles, along with case studies and notes from the field. All research articles will be double blind peer-reviewed. Insights and analytical perspectives from practitioners and policy makers in the form of notes from the field or case studies are also encouraged - these will not be peer-reviewed.

Please read the full Call for Papers and more specific information on the intended 'flavour' of the issue at: http://www.flinders.edu.au/medicine/sites/southgate/research/projects/digital-tech-health/

Guest editors:

*  Lareen Newman PhD, Southgate Institute for Health Society & Equity, Flinders University - Australia
*  Ali Al Sanousi MD, King Faisal Specialist Hospital & Research Centre, Riyadh - Saudi Arabia

Contact for queries and abstract submissions:  lareen.newman AT flinders.edu.au

IMPORTANT DATES
Deadline for abstracts: 14 March 2011
Notification of successful abstracts:  9 May 2011
Deadline for submission of full papers/articles: 31 August 2011
Estimated publication date: November 2011

----------------------------------------
Dr Lareen Newman, DipEurLangs (Hons), BA (Hons), PhD
Senior Research Fellow
Southgate Institute for Health Society & Equity
Flinders University - Adelaide, South Australia
Personal page: http://www.flinders.edu.au/people/lareen.newman
Program page: http://flinders.edu.au/medicine/sites/southgate/
CRICOS Provider Number: 00114A

Additional link: h2cm in community informatics ....
Jones, P. (2004) The Four Care Domains: Situations Worthy of Research. Conference: Building & Bridging Community Networks: Knowledge, Innovation & Diversity through Communication, Brighton, UK.

ERCIM News #84 - Intelligent and Cognitive Systems

Dear ERCIM News Reader,

ERCIM News No. 84 has just been published at http://ercim-news.ercim.eu/

Special Theme:
"Intelligent and Cognitive Systems"
- coordinated by: Rüdiger Dillmann and Tamim Asfour, Institute for Anthropomatics, Institute of Technology Karlsruhe, and Antonis Argyros, FORTH-ICS

- featuring the keynote "Cognitive Systems and Robotics" in the ICT Programme of the European Commission, by Hans-Georg Stork, European Commission, Information Society and Media Directorate General, Unit E5 “Cognitive Systems,Interaction, Robotics.

Includes on p.20
Long-term Evaluation of a Mobile Remote Presence Robot for the Elderly
by Amedeo Cesta, Gabriella Cortellessa, Lorenza Tiberio

Next issue: April 2011 - Special Theme: "Unconventional Computing Paradigms"

Thank you for your interest in ERCIM News.

Feel free to forward this message to others who might be interested.
Best regards,
Peter Kunz
ERCIM News central editor

Call for Papers: 1st Int. Workshop on Pervasive Care for People with Dementia and their Carers (PCPDC-2011)

(To the webmasters of http://www.pervasivehealth.org please check the status of your site - 'attack site')

Dublin, Ireland, 23 May 2011

http://trail.ulster.ac.uk/pcpdc/

To be held in conjunction with the 5th International ICST Conference on Pervasive Computing Technologies for Healthcare 2011

The global population of persons aged 60 and over is rising dramatically. Between 2006 and 2050, the number of people aged 60 and over will double from 650 million to 2 billion people representing 22% of humanity. One group of the ageing population that is particularly vulnerable to loss of independence is those affected by dementia. It is estimated that around 820,000 people in the UK have dementia. Recently emerging computing and assistive technology have been used to attempt to improve the quality of life for people with dementia..

The workshop aims to provide a forum for discussion on challenges and opportunities in bringing technology to support people with dementia. The workshop will feature the theme of ‘engaging people with pervasive technology’.

Research topics included in the workshop

This workshop will feature the theme of  ‘engaging people with pervasive technology’ in dementia research. Researchers from academic, healthcare, industrial and third party organisations are invited to contribute. Early researchers and researchers from healthcare are particularly welcome. Research areas include, but are not limited to:

Theme 1 – What are the opportunities of pervasive care technology?

Development of pervasive ICT systems
Human computer interface design
Behaviour monitoring and activity recognition
Knowledge representation and dissemination
Data analysis and interpretation
Sensor design and application

Theme 2 – User engagement

Key issues emerging when working with people who have decreased capacity for consent
Ethical issues for implementation
Methods for engagement
Pitfalls of engaging people with dementia, their carers and intermediate users

Important dates

Submission deadline:          25th February 2011
Notification of acceptance: 25th March 2011
Camera-ready copy due:    4th April 2011
Conference / Workshop:    23rd – 26th / 23rd May 2011

Format

Submitted papers should not be longer than 4 pages in standard IEEE two-column format.

For more detailed formatting instructions please see http://www.pervasivehealth.org/?page_name=author_skit.

Accepted papers will be published online in IEEE Xplore Digital Library (to be confirmed).

Call for Papers - 2011 CHI Workshop on Bridging Practices, Theories, and Technologies to Support Reminiscence

CALL FOR PAPERS

CHI Workshop on Bridging Practices, Theories, and Technologies to Support Reminiscence 2011
http://www.cs.cornell.edu/~danco/remchiwork/

CHI 2011 Workshop

This one-day workshop explores how HCI-related practice and research can understand and support reminiscence. The workshop has two main goals. First, we hope to bring together academics and practitioners from a variety of backgrounds, disciplines, levels of experience, and approaches to studying and supporting reminiscing. Second, we hope to explore a variety of topics around current and potential uses of technology to support reminiscence, including but not limited to:

- understanding people's current practices around reminiscing;
- exploring empirical studies and theories of memory that might inform technology designs;
- presenting, critiquing, and evaluating existing technologies for reminiscence,
- considering how technology might support new reminiscing practices, and
- supporting social aspects of reminiscence.

We are particularly interested in participants from outside the CHI community to foster new perspectives and collaborations. Our plan is to conduct three short discussion-focused panels organized around participants' interests. Those discussions will ground small groups in articulating interesting directions, studies, designs, and outlines of potential grant and book proposals at the intersection of reminiscing and technology

SUBMISSION

Interested participants should mail position papers of up to 6 pages in .pdf versions of the CHI Extended Abstracts format to danco at cs.cornell.edu by January 14, 2011. Papers should clearly express how the authors' participation will further the goals of the workshop: what do authors offer and hope to gain by participating? They should also clearly, but briefly, present participating authors' backgrounds, in order to support our goals of creating a diverse group of participants.

We will notify accepted participants on or before February 11, 2001. A limited amount of funding will be available, primarily to support attendance for people from other disciplines who are not regular CHI attendees. The workshop will be held on Sunday May 8, 2011 in Vancouver, Canada. Please note that at least one author of an accepted position paper must register for the workshop and for one or more days of the CHI 2011 conference.

IMPORTANT DATES

- Jan 14, 2011: Position papers due
- Feb 11, 2011: Notifications of participation
- Apr 1, 2011: Final versions of position papers (to be shared with other participants)
- May 8, 2011: (Sunday) The workshop! (Here's the list of all workshops.)
- May 9-12 2011: CHI itself

ORGANIZERS

- Dan Cosley, Information Science, Cornell University danco at cs.cornell.edu
- Maurice Mulvenna, School of Computing and Mathematics, University of Ulster md.mulvenna at ulster.ac.uk
- Victoria Schwanda, Information Science, Cornell University vls48 at cornell.edu
- S. Tejaswi Peesapati, Information Science, Cornell University stp53 at cornell.edu

Information Revolution and Greater Choice and Control - webchat Nov 9

Put your questions about the Information Revolution and Greater Choice and Control direct to Andrew Lansley, Secretary of State for Health, on November 9 at 1.30pm.

People can ask questions in advance by emailing:
informationrevolution AT dh.gsi.gov.uk - or -

 by Tweeting their question, using the hashtag #inforevolution.

The webchat will be available from November 9 at www.dh.gov.uk/informationrevolution and you can watch the live Q&A on screen, ask questions and leave comments. We will also be tweeting Andrew Lansley's answers and the comments we receive. A transcript of the webchat will be available on the website after the event.

I would be grateful if you could bring this to the attention of any interested individuals or groups.

With best wishes

Anne Cooper
National Clinical Lead for Nursing
Office of the Chief Clinical Officer
NHS Connecting for Health
anne.cooper AT nhs.net
http://www.connectingforhealth.nhs.uk
NHS Connecting for Health supports the NHS in providing better, safer care by delivering computer systems and services which improve the way patient information is stored and accessed.
Additional link:
http://conversations.dh.gov.uk/2010/10/17/home/
My source:
British Computer Society Nursing Specialist Group

New: The Journal of Humanities and Information Systems

Dear colleagues

It is my pleasure to announce a new journal, published by IBIMA, that will cater for articles in the interdisciplinary field of Information Systems and the Humanities (JHIS). This is a call for submissions for the first edtion of JHIS.

JOURNAL DESCRIPTION

The Journal of Humanities and Information Systems (JHIS) is an international peer reviewed and applied research journal that publishes papers on the symbiotic relationship between the two disciplines of Information Systems and the Humanities. Its unique focus will be research on Humanities-enriched IS, but other Humanities-Computing papers and case studies will also be considered. All papers will be subjected to a multiple blind peer review process. Papers should contribute to the existing body of knowledge of the domain in terms of theory and/or practice.

MISSION

JHIS aims to create an international forum to discuss and evaluate studies that implement theoretical constructs borrowed from the Humanities in various aspects of Information Systems, as well as investigations regarding the application of information technology in the Humanities. The creation of
publication opportunities for research with refreshing angles, some borrowed from other sciences, is a conscious effort to share interest and useful research and to counteract rigid procedures that are "stifling the intellectual advancement of our discipline" (Shoib and Nandhakumar, 2009).

SCOPE

Topics of interest for this journal include, but are not limited to, the following list:

• Linguistics and Information Systems
• History and Information Systems
• Art and Information Systems
• Philosophy and Information Systems
• Law and Information Systems
• Hermeneutics and Information Systems

CALL FOR ARTICLE SUBMISSIONS TO JHIS

Since there still are limited publication opportunities for Information System scientists (cf. Straub, 2009:v) in comparison with some other older, well-established disciplines, new opportunities should be embraced and used in order to build our discipline. Therefore, our colleagues are invited to submit some of their research outputs to this new outlet.

ASSOCIATE EDITORS AND PEER REVIEWERS

Please let me know if you would be interested to become an associate editor or peer reviewer of JHIS.
The editors and reviewers of JHIS should be like diamond miners taking a positive view while looking for "exciting forays into new research domains" (Straub, 2009:vii). The general aim in the review processes of this new journal will be to be inclusive and developmental rather than to perform "a
modern hygiene ritual", because we agree with Wastell and MacMaster (2008:64) that "a high rejection rate implies a collective failure of scholarship not the intellectual prosperity of a field".

For more information about the journal and submissions, see:
http://www.ibimapublishing.com/journals/JHIS/jhis.html

Jan H. Kroeze, School of Computing, University of South Africa
(editor-in-chief)

My source:
Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 24, No. 451
Centre for Computing in the Humanities, King's College London
www.digitalhumanities.org/humanist

HCI 2011 Health, Wealth and Happiness Call for Papers

The 25th British Conference on Human-Computer Interaction (HCI2011)

July 4th - 8th, 2011 at Northumbria University, Newcastle-upon-Tyne, UK.

The HCI Educators conference, Workshops and Tutorials will be held on 4th and 5th July, 2011 and a Doctorial Consortium on the 5th July. The main conference runs from the 6th-8th July, 2011. HCI 2011 is organised by the PaCT Lab (Northumbria University) in cooperation with the British Computer Society.

This year we will be looking for papers to put in our alt.hci sessions. So if you think your work doesn't usually make it into this conference then maybe this year is your year.

Accepted papers will be published by BCS in the annual conference proceedings, freely available online in BCS Electronic Workshops in Computing (eWiC) and will also be included in the ACM digital library.

Important Dates:

• Full Paper and Workshop submission: 21st January, 2011
• Workshop notification of acceptance: 11th February, 2011
• Work in Progress and alt.chi submission: 18th February, 2011
• Short and Posters  submission: 18th February, 2011
• Demos and Experiences submission: 18th February, 2011
• Doctoral Consortium 18th February, 2011
• Panels: 18th February, 2011
• Notification of Acceptance for all other categories: 8th April 2011
• Camera-ready copy for proceedings required by 6th May 2011

Deadline for author registration: 4th May 2011

Conference: 4th July - 8th July, 2011

Conference Scope and Description:

Human Computer Interaction is a key area of computing. This is the leading conference in the field of Human Computer Interaction in the UK. It covers the design, evaluation and application of techniques and approaches for interacting with devices and services.  HCI is now on its 25th conference and at this anniversary we ask you to reflect on our theme of Health, Wealth and Happiness. Technology is posed to play a growing part in our health and maintaining well being into older age; wealth manifests itself in many ways, many of which we do not always recognise - relationships, richness of life experience, creativity and innovation, knowledge and qualities of character. Lastly is there a relationship between happiness and technology use, will more gadgets increase our well being? And as ever contributions in any aspect of HCI are welcome.

Suggested topics:

We solicit original research and technical papers not published elsewhere including the following topics:

• Affective interaction
• Aesthetic interaction
• Art and interaction
• Bodily interaction
• Cyber-relationships, sex and eroticism
• Design and Evaluation methods
• Ethnographic and field studies
• Ethics and HCI
• Experience Design
• Fun and Play
• Health informatics and technology
• Human values
• Information visualization and presentation
• Interaction Criticism
• Moods, meditation and relaxation
• Musical and audio interaction
• Novel interaction techniques and devices
• Privacy, Security and Trust
• Social networking
• Spirituality and Beliefs
• Sustainability and HCI
• Ubiquitous, pervasive, and mobile interaction
• Universal design
• Usability studies
• User Experience
• Wearables and fashion
• Wellbeing and technology

Keynote Speakers

• Abigail Sellon, Microsoft Research, UK
• Gregory Abowd, Georgia Tech, USA

Paper Submission:

Submissions must be in an electronic form as PDF format. All submissions should be formatted to the ACM standard, see http://www.acm.org/sigs/publications/proceedings-templates , and will appear on-line in the BCS EWiCS series and the ACM Digital Library.

Submissions should be made through the EasyChair system, which will open for submissions in November and will be linked from the conference website http://www.hci2011.co.uk/ with detailed instructions. We have put together an international review panel. Submissions will be peer-reviewed by at least 3 peer-reviewers, selected by the appropriate chairs. Additional guidelines can be found on the conference's website.

It is a condition of acceptance that at least one author must register for each accepted paper, no later than the early bird deadline of 4th May 2011.

ERCIM News No. 83 Special Theme: "Cloud Computing"

Dear ERCIM News Reader,

ERCIM News No. 83 has just been published at http://ercim-news.ercim.eu/

Special Theme:
"Cloud Computing"
- coordinated by: Frédéric Desprez, Ottmar Krämer-Fuhrmann and Ramin Yahyapour
- featuring the keynote "Cloud Computing: The Next Big Thing?" by Burkhard Neidecker-Lutz, Keith Jeffery, Maria Tsakali and Lutz Schubert.

Next issue: January 2011 - Special Theme: "Intelligent and Cognitive Systems"

Thank you for your interest in ERCIM News.
Feel free to forward this message to others who might be interested.

Best regards,
Peter Kunz
ERCIM News central editor
Follow us on http://twitter.com/ercim_news

Of note in ERCIM #83 :

An Infrastructure for Clinical Trials for Cancer – ACGT Project Successfully Terminated; by Jessica Michel Assoumou and Manolis Tsiknakis
http://eu-acgt.org/

Mastering Data-Intensive Collaboration and Decision Making through a Cloud Infrastructure; by Nikos Karacapilidis, Stefan Rüping and Isabel Drost
http://dicode-project.eu/

Finally, the first issue of 2011 #84 sounds a great prospect!

Drupal musings 16: 1% digital and analogue memories

At Drupalcon in his keynotes Dries Buytaert has highlighted that Drupal now powers approximately 1% of the web. While 1% is not much especially given the total size of the internet with its day on day, hour by hour growth this is nonetheless a significant milestone. Especially when Dries speculates on the growth of Drupal projected ahead to 2020.

Like all digital media Drupal is a tool that extends our personal and cultural memories. As all the keynotes showed Drupal, PHP, HTML[5] all have histories of their own and a role to play in providing a surrogate memory. The media and technology [IBM] regularly predict how technology will change our lives, including how we remember.

Amid such speculation memory still makes us who we are. You and I have a yesterday, today - and we pray - a tomorrow.

This is the bootstrap that counts

Bootstrapping or booting refers to a group of metaphors that share a common meaning:

a self-sustaining process that proceeds without external help. ...
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bootstrap

Striking then the news this week that - dementia costs 'equal to 1% of global GDP'.

Keeping Research Data Safe (KRDS) Project

From: Neil Beagrie neil at beagrie.com
To: RECORDS-MANAGEMENT-UK at JISCMAIL.AC.UK

I am pleased to announce the release of a new Factsheet from the Keeping Research Data Safe (KRDS) project on the costs and benefits of digital preservation. The Factsheet is available for download as a PDF from http://www.beagrie.com/KRDS_Factsheet_0910.pdf

If you are attending the iPRES 2010 conference in Vienna next week there will be print copies available on the JISC stand.

The A4 four-page factsheet is intended to be suitable for senior managers and others interested in a concise summary of our key findings. It will be relevant to all repositories and institutions holding digital material but of particular interest to anyone responsible for or involved in the long-term management of research data.

The factsheet covers the following major areas:

• Cost issues in digital preservation (what costs most, impact of fixed costs, declining costs over time);
• Benefits from digital preservation (benefits taxonomy, direct benefits, indirect benefits, near-term benefits, long-term benefits);
• Institutional issues (repository models and structures, key cost variables, data collection levels).

We hope the Factsheet will be of value to the digital preservation and research data communities and plan to release a further KRDS publication later this year (a KRDS User Guide).

The Keeping Research Data Safe studies have been funded by JISC and conducted by a partnership of the following institutions: Charles Beagrie Ltd, OCLC Research, the UK Data Archive, the Archaeology Data Service, the University of London Computer Centre, and the universities of Cambridge, King’s College London, Oxford and Southampton.

Neil Beagrie
Charles Beagrie Ltd
Digital Access and Preservation
Management and Research Consultancy

Website: www.beagrie.com
Blog: www.blog.beagrie.com

New PC - my own Chaos Manor

Well two days ago it arrived: the new PC! A black encased i7 3.2 quad core c/o PC Specialist based in Holmfirth.

I've read some of his most popular SF books and the past few days I've been reminded of his monthly contributions to Byte magazine. I'm on about Jerry Pournelle and his Chaos Manor essays, in which new PC kit and gadgets obviously featured.

For months I've been visiting several supplier's website and configuring 'my new PC' and yes I've done it on the Apple site specifying the most expensive piece of kit available. Taking the plunge with PC Specialist I've been impressed (thus far) with their pre-sales, pre-delivery and delivery service. There was confirmation with regular updates by e-mail and texts as my PC came into being. I opted for Mon-Fri delivery between 0700-1000. My bit-of-a-beast arrived at 0800 (with the toast and coffee).

Clinically, you always worry for the worst, but there was no DOA here.

It booted up nicely and the noise: so quiet! I made sure the case is acoustically damped. I'd already sourced a screen, keyboard and mouse, so there was a brief scare when Windows 7 prompted finger action and of course what to do? In Windows 7, Microsoft have an operating system that is suddenly (fingers x'd) very forgiving. Despite the tag on the USB connector saying 'install the software first' or words to that effect I removed the tag and connected the MS Natural Ergonomic KB 4000. A random drum of fingers heard cries of delight and account creation. It's proved a real breeze as the (latest!) drivers have been downloaded automatically. I noticed the power cord - PC attachment can be sensitive to fairly slight knocks, if you are not careful, but that's nothing new.

There are tools to check your site on several browsers and mobile format, but I've just Opera and Safari to add. Check this site's logo on a suitably equipped browser (I used Google's Chrome).*

E-mail and ftp have proved problematic so far. I've been tied to Demon's Turnpike which is basic (and anonymous), but does the job. Now with W7 64-bit I'm not prepared to mess about with virtual machines and other fixes. So I am now trying other email clients. FireFTP is in-situ awaiting my attention. There will be quite a few conferences out of date on the links pages, but we'll get there.

Adobe Dreamweaver CS5 is installed. I first purchased the MX (educational) version in 2003-2004, and just had to upgrade. Strange that I always wondered about that other functionality PHP, CSS, Javascript I never got to grips with. Now with Drupal there's no choice and no going back! Dreamweaver looks well - dream like. In a way you know this new machine is a set-back. I'm determined whether software or the new keyboard and other facilities to fully use this new machine, which means distraction.

One of my favourite books is CETI edited by Carl Sagan. ...

My dual core Macbook Pro has been processing two units at a time from Rosetta and SETI@home. Suddenly there's nine ticking away. In fact I am having to check to figure out just what is doing what in the innards that includes twin graphics cards with CUDA processors. At some point I really must throw a game into the mix. The noise from the fans has increased, but is still 'quiet' compared to the Evesham box.

WAMP is up and running (or at least appears to be) and Drupal 6 and 7 are in place. I'm going to see if I can export - import stuff in Drupal 6. Drupal and updating remains a demon here. (If you are looking for admin training try Menus and Blocks).

Before I close I have to say a belated thanks to Evesham Computers - sadly no longer trading. That PC from November 2002 is still going, the motherboard clock needs a new battery, the 100GB hard disc a wipe and refresh.

I hope this latest machine fulfills its great promise. So thanks also to the team at PC Specialist specifically:

Built By : Andrew Vincent
Tested By : Zbear Ramzan
QC'd By : Craig Whiteley
Packed By : Adnaan Marban

I'll report again on developments. I was able to select the hard disc partitions soon after placing my order. I nearly missed that, but so glad I didn't. I will allocate specific space for images, photos, music, Drupal and Ruby. First though I'll check on installing Linux too.

Maybe as per Mr Pournelle I should give this new machine a name? Well why not? I'm not going to eat it (I hope). Much still to do!

* An item mentioned in this month's .net magazine.

England: The future of the National Programme for IT

Department of Health - 09 Sep 2010 12:32
The future of the National Programme for IT
-----------------------------------------------------

A Department of Health review of the National Programme for IT has concluded that a centralised, national approach is no longer required, and that a more locally-led plural system of procurement should operate, whilst continuing with national applications already procured.

http://www.wired-gov.net/wg/wg-news-1.nsf/lfi/415392

My source: Wired-GOV

PC footprints 1981 - 2010

At the Eden Project there is a sculpture which depicts the e-hardware an average Jo will use and dispose of in a lifetime (those teeth are made up of computer mouse). Overall this amounts to 3.3 tonnes.

I've listed this before on W2tQ, but my micro - PC footprint runs as follows:

• Sinclair ZX81 - 1981
• BBC microcomputer model 'B'
• BBC Master 128 - 1986
• Elonex 286 PC
• Dell 486 PC
• MacBook Pro - October 2008
  
• Evesham Pentium 4 PC - November 2002

This w/e after Drupalcon I am adding to my pile. I've managed very well, but it is definitely time for a new PC.

Additional link:
http://weeeman.org/html/impact/about.html

Paper: Patel et al. (2009) Clinical complexity and medical education

The following item about a paper from last year was posted by Rakesh Biswas on the COMPLEXITY-PRIMARY-CARE list. After Rakesh's comments I have included a quotation.

The paper in question by Patel, et al. will be an important reference for me, even though the definition of domain and discipline remains problematic. (A glossary for the health career model will follow on the new site.)

Suddenly, the passing of time is also clear given that:

Shortcliffe, E.H. (et al.) Ed. (1990) A History of Medical Informatics, Wokingham, Addison-Wesley Publishing Co.

- appeared twenty years ago. Ten years ago I cited Shortcliffe et al..

Twenty years! How long is that in technology / internet terms?

The bold text below is my emphasis:

From: Rakesh Biswas
To: COMPLEXITY-PRIMARY-CARE@JISCMAIL.AC.UK
Sent: Thu, 12 August, 2010 16:41:06
Subject: Clinical complexity and medical education

As our society progresses in the accumulation of knowledge and as the complexity of this knowledge increases, it becomes more important to determine how to structure education to provide individuals with the most comprehensive base of knowledge without sacrificing either depth and complexity or broadness of material.

Human beings have an extraordinary capacity for storing large volumes of organized information in memory. How does one apply such detailed knowledge to practical, real-world problems and situations?

What is the optimal mode of learning that will promote flexibility and transfer of general knowledge across domains during problem-solving?

For more, see the article by Dr Patel whose focus area is Medical Cognition (how doctors think and develop their so called expertise).

Regards,
Rakesh

Here is a quote from the paper:

Much of the early research in the study of reasoning in domains such as medicine was carried out in laboratory or experimental settings. There has been a shift in more recent years toward examining cognitive issues in naturalistic medical settings, such as medical teams in intensive care units [2], anesthesiologists working in surgery[89], nurses providing emergency telephone triage [90], and reasoning with technology by patients [91] in the health care system. This research was informed by work in the area of dynamic decision-making [92], complex problem-solving [93], human factors [94,95], and cognitive engineering [44]. Naturalistic studies reshaped researchers’ views of human thinking, as expressed in ‘‘situativity” theory’s terms (as described in Section 2.1.4) [23–26], by shifting the onus of cognition from being the unique province of the individual to being distributed across social and technological contexts. p.186.

Whilst as Rakesh points out Dr. Patel's focus is medical cognition, then through the health career model it would appear my interest is nursing cognition. As per the legacy of models of nursing - which did recognize the patient through the concept of patiency (Stevens, 1979) - we realise that now all disciplines must demand much more of their respective models in the 21st century.

Patel, V.L., et al. (2009) Cognitive and learning sciences in biomedical and health instructional design: A review with lessons for biomedical informatics education, Journal of Biomedical Informatics, 42, 176–197.
doi:10.1016/j.jbi.2008.12.002

Stevens, B.J. (1979) Nursing Theory: Analysis, Application, Evaluation. Boston: Little, Brown and Company.

From: Harvard Business Review - The Four Phases of Design Thinking

I came across the following post on the Harvard Business Review Blog Network - The Conversation:

10:54 AM Thursday July 29, 2010
by Warren Berger

What can people in business learn from studying the ways successful designers solve problems and innovate? On the most basic level, they can learn to question, care, connect, and commit — four of the most important things successful designers do to achieve significant breakthroughs.

Having studied more than a hundred top designers in various fields over the past couple of years (while doing research for a book), I found that there were a few shared behaviors that seemed to be almost second nature to many designers. And these ingrained habits were intrinsically linked to the designer's ability to bring original ideas into the world as successful innovations. All of which suggests that they merit a closer look.

You can read the whole of Warren's original post, while below I have taken his focus concepts CONNECT, CARE, COMMIT and QUESTION and associated them to the care (knowledge) domains of Hodges' model. Following that there is a rationale. ...

connect	question
care	commit

Connect:Intrapersonal
Placed in the intra-interpersonal domain this is the domain of concepts, thoughts, ideas, creativity and innovation. This is the essence of Warren's reference to 'connect' -

Designers, I discovered, have a knack for synthesizing--for taking existing elements or ideas and mashing them together in fresh new ways.

The INTERPERSONAL links page also highlights other conceptual 'inhabitants' here; in particular knowledge management, the semantic web and psychology. If analysis and reduction is the outcome of the hard sciences, then here as Warren writes is synthesis, integration and invention. We can see how self-belief is critical to many innovators who pursue their dreams regardless of rebuffs by the establishment, to whom - within the health career model - they are also diametrically opposed.

Question:Sciences
The ability to question lie at the heart of human activity, and although thought and mind are represented in the interpersonal domain, questions also exemplify the output of human reasoning powers in the SCIENCES. Evidence based care depends on an ongoing process-ion of questions that drive research. Problem solving with its iterative sequence of assess (question), plan, action, evaluation (question). The health career model reminds us though of the need to consider not only quantity, logic and objective measures, but the role of qualitative research and methods.

Care:Sociology
Seeing Warren's inclusion of 'care' drew me to his post. Here he concludes:

Focus groups and questionnaires don't cut it; designers know that you must care enough to actually be present in people's lives.

Health and (social!) care are social activities. Our students are socialised into the professions and disciplines as they pursue their careers. Our work depends on the effectiveness of human communication and relationships. You can read about 'counselling' and only get so far; ultimately health care is experiential. It is something to be practised.

Commit:POLITICAL
Warren deals with the way designer's view risk and committing early to an idea and the project that might follow. For me 'commit' and being committed has explicit political - power - connotations. So, Warren's reference to commit in the sense of producing a model or prototype and working through problems can be extended. Invention and design may be cognitive pursuits, but they are non-trivial in that they must ultimately and literally be negotiated. Being able to 'commit' needs to be sanctioned. Individuals need to be empowered, or recognise when to either proceed or seek advice and guidance. Furthermore, Warren notes:

The designer's ability to "fail forward" is a particularly valuable quality in times of dynamic change. Today, many companies find themselves operating in a test-and-learn business environment that requires rapid prototyping. (?)

Perhaps the recognition in health policy of the need to balance negative and positive risk taking, self-care and personalised budgets can also be discerned in the above?

Acknowledgement:
Thanks to Warren Berger and HBR

Community Informatics and Older People: A Call for Papers

This call for papers is for a special issue of the Journal of Community Informatics on ICTs and Older Persons. Examples of activities using ICTs for support of the elderly in Less Developed Countries are particularly encouraged.

Community Informatics and Older People: A Call for Papers

If you have an article (or an idea for one) contact
Geneloeb Aronin, Ph.D. by July 15th geneloeb at gmail.com.

The peer-reviewed Journal of Community Informatics (www.ci-journal.net) is inviting submissions of articles for a special issue on community informatics and elderly. Community Informatics is concerned with the use of Information and Communications Technologies (ICTs) to enable and empower local communities including for personal, social, cultural or economic development of and within communities.

There has been a recent a surge in the use of ICTs involving the geriatric community, elderly and those associated with their care or needs. This activity has taken several forms, including: the elderly communicating with others by computers and other technologies; technical devices used to monitor needs or send warnings; information from governments is now available online including training programs for older people to access such information; and the use of ICTs to support community caregivers for the elderly, self-help and self-care for the elderly, and as an infrastructure for the development of virtual community connections among the elderly and between the elderly and others are burgeoning areas of community care and in some places part of the public health system. We would very much welcome explorations and systematic (and other) accounts of these processes and others.

Now is the opportunity to examine model practices of ICT to benefit communities of older persons and their families, to support their care and their caregivers within communities and to suggest new ways in which ICTs can be used to maximize community based initiatives and opportunities.

Articles in the planned issue will focus on the use of ICTs for personal, social, cultural or economic development of, and within, communities for the elderly. We would look to include paradigms for reaching out to elderly people who can not yet access ICTs for these benefits; demonstrate improved technical frameworks for community based ICT applications; show the effectiveness of applications and new ways technology may be applied. Examples of activities using ICTs for support of the elderly in Less Developed Countries are particularly encouraged.

What other ideas and suggestions do you have? Email the co-ordinator for this issue,
Geneloeb: geneloeb at gmail.com

With Best Wishes for an Even Better Day

Gene-loeb
Gene-loeb Aronin, Ph.D.

Clinical Informatics in the North West – the start of a new era!

This meeting is free and open to all, but please notify your intention to attend to: phil.paterson at bcs.org.uk
Please forward this email to colleagues who may be interested ...
============================================

Thursday, 1st July 2010, 6.15pm light buffet, 7pm talk
Clinical Informatics in the North West – the start of a new era!
Speakers: Dr Andrew Coley, Dr Asad Sadiq, Mr Bibhas Roy, Dr Sydney Schneidman, Dr Rhidian Bramley, Dr Amir Hannan
Organiser: BCS Health Northern
Venue: Manchester Conference Centre, Sackville Street, M1 3BB
Directions: www.manchesterconferencecentre.co.uk/location/

HICAT - a new approach by NHS Northwest – is this the start of a new era for Clinical Informatics in the region?

The HICAT are the Health Informatics Clinical Advisory Team at NHS North-West:

• Dr Andrew Coley is the Senior Clinical Officer.
• Dr Asad Sadiq is a consultant psychiatrist and Mental Health IT lead.
• Mr Bibhas Roy is an orthopaedic surgeon and Secondary Care IT lead.
• Dr Schneidman is an A&E consultant and Lorenzo clinical IT lead.
• Dr Bramley is a consultant radiologist and Diagnostics IT lead.
• Dr Hannan is a GP and the Primary Care IT lead.

We will describe the HICAT Mission Statement and the principles used to help deliver the next generation healthcare using IT to help deliver care. We will describe what we are doing for Clinical Informatics across the board in the North West and what impact we expect from the initiatives and efforts to have on clinical practice in the region, both short term and long. We will explain how our work will benefit patients. The speakers will be happy to discuss our plans and expectations with a knowledgeable audience and to take note of helpful feedback.

This talk should appeal to all with an interest in the use of Informatics by clinicians and the impact that can have on the quality and safety of patient care and the efficiency of services provided through the NHS.

Everyone welcome to attend this FREE event
but please notify your intention to attend to
phil.paterson at bcs.org.uk

If you have any queries on anything BCS related then please do not hesitate to contact me. Also, if you know of any IT events that would be of interest to fellow members, then please let me know.

Regards,
Andrew Mohan,
Chairman,
BCS Manchester Branch.
Andrew_Mohan at bcs.org.uk

www.bcsmanchester.org.uk
The Branch's website has details on all of its events and links to the other BCS groups that operate in the Greater Manchester area.

http://twitter.com/bcsmanchester

EHR Software Market Share Analysis & UK residential care / nursing home sector musings

Last month (20th May 2010) Chris Thorman, who blogs about EMR systems at Software Advice, e-mailed me (copied below). Could I mention his recent EHR post on my blog?

Well thanks Chris! It is very encouraging to learn that W2tQ is seen by others as an infocare centre and valuable media avenue. It is very difficult for me to comment on this USA based analysis which is detailed at:

EHR Software Market Share Analysis

- but here are some thoughts. ... This is a great piece of work-in-progress which acknowledges the problem of being 100% comprehensive and coherent given the task, plus the market's spread and dynamics.

My perspective is UK and my full-time work as a nurse gives me a limited outlook on health IT markets as a whole. Nonetheless I value efforts to capture such data in order to better understand the health informatics industry and grasp the bigger picture. As Chris notes this project is challenging, the post is also an appeal for help. While a great proportion of surveys are commercial in motivation, the e-community and e-media can now add value by pointing out the gaps and other data sources. The comments that conclude Chris's post ably demonstrate this.

I would very much like to read something similar for the UK, including the use of information systems in the residential and nursing home sector (any suggestions welcome). It still amazes me how many care homes - including those that are part of large business groups - do not use a 'resident' information system.

Perhaps the new - post-election - health ICT market in England will see new opportunities?
(See post re. 1 July 2010 NW England BCS - British Computer Society meeting).

In ICT terms the care / nursing home sector to me seems passive; it is content to be waited-upon by primary care and the hospital based systems. If they are not engaged on this level can they (and others, e.g. commissioners) argue that they are integrated? I think not.

Care homes need to realize that a dedicated information system could pay dividends in terms of assessment; continuity of care (transfer of care); quality of care; client, family and staff engagement, reporting to inform commissioning, inspection and marketing. When we talk of a patient's viability, there is also the question of the future viability of this market sector amid competition, economics, standards and costs ... ?

Buyer sought for Loyd’s Nursing Homes Group’s 64 care homes
Catherine Boyle, Times Online, 21 May 2010.

Chris' focus is the EHR market, very much concentrated upon physician, medical and medical billing coding  applications. This is reflected in the search facility on the Software Advice website. The search is constrained and directed, driven of course by the underlying database of companies, their applications and reviews. Markets are, however, defined by their boundaries and the way they change over time. Anticipation of that change is a gift indeed.

The personal health record (PHR) lies outside the scope of this Software Advice post, since as per WikiPedia:

It is important to note that PHRs are not the same as EHRs (electronic health records). The latter are software systems designed for use by health care providers. Like the data recorded in paper-based medical records, the data in EHRs are legally mandated notes on the care provided by clinicians to patients. There is no legal mandate that compels a consumer or patient to store her personal health information in a PHR.

This work by Chris and respondents helps to establish and define the boundaries. The EHRs in question are not purely institutional (e.g. hospital-based), the vendors cater for varying numbers of users, in different care settings as you can see on the site's 3-stage search. So while I cannot add anything as such, I wonder if there could (should) be scope for residential care in there?

Or perhaps the EHR market is not viable when it comes to older adult* residential care?

Heaven forbid that the transatlantic (and global) EHR market is ageist!

Thanks again Chris.

*Residential care is also needed for younger adults too.

From: Chris Thorman
To: " Peter,"
Sent: Thu, 20 May, 2010 18:57:41
Subject: Blog post idea for your blog

Hello Peter,

I hope you've had a good week. I just finished a blog post about market share in the EMR industry and I wanted to give you a heads up about it. Here is the link:

http://www.softwareadvice.com/articles/medical/ehr-software-market-share-analysis-1051410/

In the article, I broke down:

• The size of the outpatient EMR market;
• What EMR vendors have the most physicians using their system; and,
• What EMR vendors have the most practices using their system.

As I'm sure you can imagine, it was a tough project to get accurate numbers on. I was hoping you could mention my article on your blog to get more eyes on it so we can clear up any discrepancies. Sort of a "crowd sourcing" project if you will. I'd also be interested to read your thoughts on our findings.

Would you mind mentioning my post?

------------------------------------------------------------
Chris Thorman
Senior Marketing Manager
Software Advice
www.softwareadvice.com
chris at softwareadvice.com

Prognosis for NPfIT remains uncertain - 21 May 2010 - Computing

While the coalition government’s Programme for Government reiterates previous commitments around technology and civil liberties, IT procurement and broadband rollout, it is noticeably silent on the future of the NHS National Programme for IT (NPfIT), with no mention of Conservative promises prior to the election to dismantle the "NHS supercomputer" or the Liberal Democrats' pledge to scrap large parts of the NPfIT.
...

Prognosis for NPfIT remains uncertain - 21 May 2010 - Computing

Musings in the nursing domain (specific language)

It is one giant leap from the humanistic world of nursing, health and social care to the m(a-e)chismo of information technology. It is no Earth-bound chasm that greets us in considering the vaguest possibility that nursing could ever be captured, distilled and represented in a domain specific language (DSL). Given the full title of Hodges' model my attraction to DSLs should be obvious, but how realistic is this fascination?

Here are some links to definitions / resources on DSLs:

• Michael Fowler
• DSL Bibliography
• WikiPedia

I am not advocating DSLs as a real time clinical software application, there is neither time here, nor on the wards. Since the sky above is clear blue with not a contrail in sight I am indulging in a little blue sky thinking, a reverie...

Nursing already has its concept analysis, but taken at face value this says nothing about domains as per h2cm (other than the context / application is nursing). To avoid confusion with career in the job-work sense, I have emphasized the notion of domains. By this I mean a partition of specific knowledge about a discipline or subject. This disciplinary focus or subject is often the province of expert practitioners. My forte then in Hodges' model are the INTERPERSONAL and SOCIAL care domains. This is my rationale for the musings here, as all experts were learners once upon a time, and are still as lifelong learners. It is an educational application that I have in mind.

I have come across a paper by Reinhartz-Berger, who describes the movement - Towards automatization of domain modeling. The author refers to domains artifacts and domain analysis:
(I have removed the reference numbers and inserted from prev para*)

A domain in this context [Domain engineering, also known as software product line engineering]* can be defined as a set of applications that use common concepts to describe requirements, problems, capabilities, and solutions. Domain artifacts are built and reused through domain analysis, which identifies the domains and captures their ontology to assist and guide system developers with particular applications in those domains. Despite the rapid growth of technologies and technical solutions, domain analysis models usually remain valid longer than domain designs and implementations, potentially justifying the cost and effort required for their development. Domain analysis artifacts may also serve as the basis for defining Domain-Specific Languages (DSL). Reinhartz-Berger (2010), p.491.

As the previous post - Reading the signs... Idealised Care - amongst several revealed, the domains within the health career model are broad to say the least. So broad that from the INDIVIDUAL-GROUP axis the left-hand margin of the INTRAPERSONAL-SOCIOLOGY^# care domains are but distant horizons (with no curvature in-sight). It's no surprise that I keep wondering about how to get a grasp on that 'space', for reasons of a website, a potential community of explorers, educational objectives and sheer enthusiasm for trying to mix IT up. Reinhartz-Berger continues:

Several domain analysis methods have been proposed over the years. However, they all can be criticized as making the domain engineer alone responsible for developing correct, complete, and consistent domain analysis artifacts. Since domains may cover broad areas and are usually understood only during the development process, creating domain models can be a very demanding task. It requires expertise in the domain, reaching a very high level of abstraction, and providing flexible, yet formal, artifacts. Reinhartz-Berger (2010), p.491.

Also in the literature Chavarriaga and Macías (2009) highlight two approaches that are the focus more generally to help get a grip and the big wide world of knowledge: The Semantic Web and Web 2.0.:

... However, in spite of its semantic power, one of the main underlying problems with this [semantic] paradigm is the explicit representation and visualization of information, mainly focused on ontologies and the complex relationships that these code. This has made the Semantic Web inaccessible and unmanageable by most designers that are not expert on ontological representations and languages, but on domain specific applications and creative design.
On the contrary, the Web 2.0 paradigm provides a rather pragmatic vision. It is based on the use of wikis, folksonomies and protocols like SOAP, mainly intended to the automatic management of services and the collaborative maintenance of (mainly) syntactic knowledge-based information. Moreover, Web 2.0 can be considered an end-user paradigm. ... Chavarriaga and Macías (2009), p.1329.

The Semantic Web, Web 2.0 will (at some point) figure in the new site. A folksonomy can be quite broad by definition, as there is no strict control on the definition of terms. As to DSLs in Hodges' model, there we have four VERY broad domains. Exactly how domain analysis proceeds and what domain artifacts might emerge from this model would no doubt depend on reducing each of the domains, sub-dividing, being more specific.

If nothing else at present the health career model is a hybrid cognitive domain specific language.

References: (my source: Science Direct)

Iris Reinhartz-Berger (2010) Towards automatization of domain modeling, Data & Knowledge Engineering, Volume 69, Issue 5, May 2010, Pages 491-515. doi:10.1016/j.datak.2010.01.002

Enrique Chavarriaga, José A. Macías (2009) A model-driven approach to building modern Semantic Web-Based User Interfaces, Advances in Engineering Software, Volume 40, Issue 12, December 2009, Pages 1329-1334. doi:10.1016/j.advengsoft.2009.01.016