scholarly journals Impact of the COVID-19 pandemic: a perspective from industry

2020 ◽  
Vol 22 (Supplement_P) ◽  
pp. P56-P59
Author(s):  
Nick E J West ◽  
Wai-Fung Cheong ◽  
Els Boone ◽  
Neil E Moat

Abstract The global COVID-19 pandemic has led to unprecedented change throughout society.1 As the articles in this supplement outline, all segments of the broader cardiovascular community have been forced to adapt, to change models of care delivery, and to evolve and innovate in order to deliver optimal management for cardiovascular patients. The medtech/device industry has not been exempt from such change and has been forced to navigate direct and indirect COVID-associated disruption, with effects felt from supply chain logistics to the entire product lifecycle, from the running of clinical trials to new device approvals and managing training, proctoring and congresses in an increasingly-online world. This sea-change in circumstances itself has enforced the industry, in effect, to disrupt its own processes, models and activities. Whilst some of these changes may be temporary, many will endure for some time and some will doubtless become permanent; one thing is for sure: the healthcare ecosystem, including the medical device industry, will never look quite the same again. Although the pandemic has brought a short- to medium-term medical crisis to many countries, its role as a powerful disruptor cannot be underestimated, and may indeed prove to be a force for long-term good, given the accelerated innovation and rapid adaptation that it has cultivated.

2019 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 21-28
Author(s):  
Aniela Bălăcescu ◽  
Radu Șerban Zaharia

Abstract Tourist services represent a category of services in which the inseparability of production and consumption, the inability to be storable, the immateriality, and last but not least non-durability, induces in tourism management a number of peculiarities and difficulties. Under these circumstances the development of medium-term strategies involves long-term studies regarding on the one hand the developments and characteristics of the demand, and on the other hand the tourist potential analysis at regional and local level. Although in the past 20 years there has been tremendous growth of on-line booking made by household users, the tour operators agencies as well as those with sales activity continue to offer the specific services for a large number of tourists, that number, in the case of domestic tourism, increased by 1.6 times in case of the tour operators and by 4.44 times in case of the agencies with sales activity. At the same time, there have been changes in the preferences of tourists regarding their holiday destinations in Romania. Started on these considerations, paper based on a logistic model, examines the evolution of the probabilities and scores corresponding to the way the Romanian tourists spend their holidays on the types of tourism agencies, actions and tourist areas in Romania.


Electronics ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (10) ◽  
pp. 1151
Author(s):  
Carolina Gijón ◽  
Matías Toril ◽  
Salvador Luna-Ramírez ◽  
María Luisa Marí-Altozano ◽  
José María Ruiz-Avilés

Network dimensioning is a critical task in current mobile networks, as any failure in this process leads to degraded user experience or unnecessary upgrades of network resources. For this purpose, radio planning tools often predict monthly busy-hour data traffic to detect capacity bottlenecks in advance. Supervised Learning (SL) arises as a promising solution to improve predictions obtained with legacy approaches. Previous works have shown that deep learning outperforms classical time series analysis when predicting data traffic in cellular networks in the short term (seconds/minutes) and medium term (hours/days) from long historical data series. However, long-term forecasting (several months horizon) performed in radio planning tools relies on short and noisy time series, thus requiring a separate analysis. In this work, we present the first study comparing SL and time series analysis approaches to predict monthly busy-hour data traffic on a cell basis in a live LTE network. To this end, an extensive dataset is collected, comprising data traffic per cell for a whole country during 30 months. The considered methods include Random Forest, different Neural Networks, Support Vector Regression, Seasonal Auto Regressive Integrated Moving Average and Additive Holt–Winters. Results show that SL models outperform time series approaches, while reducing data storage capacity requirements. More importantly, unlike in short-term and medium-term traffic forecasting, non-deep SL approaches are competitive with deep learning while being more computationally efficient.


Author(s):  
Joannes W. Renes ◽  
Dominique F. Maciejewski ◽  
Eline J. Regeer ◽  
Adriaan W. Hoogendoorn ◽  
Willem A. Nolen ◽  
...  

2020 ◽  
Vol 4 (Supplement_1) ◽  
pp. 711-712
Author(s):  
Katherine Ornstein ◽  
Jennifer Reckrey ◽  
Evan Bollens-Lund ◽  
Katelyn Ferreira ◽  
Mohammed Husain ◽  
...  

Abstract A large and growing population of older adults with multimorbidity, cognitive impairment, and functional disability live in the community but are homebound (never/rarely leave home). While homebound status is associated with decreased access to medical services and poor health outcomes, it is unclear how long individuals remain homebound. We used the National Health and Aging Trends Study (NHATS), a nationally representative sample of Medicare beneficiaries age 65 and over, with survey weighting to assess duration of homebound status in the community. Among the incident homebound in 2016 (n=253) , only 28% remained homebound after 1 year. 21% died, 18% were recovered, and one-third left the home but still reported difficulty. As the locus of long-term care shifts from nursing homes to the community and models of care expand to serve the needs of the homebound, it is critical that we better understand the heterogeneity and transitions of the homebound population.


2021 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. e240441
Author(s):  
Tannous Jorge Sassine ◽  
Bernardo Barcellos Terra ◽  
Vincenzo Giordano ◽  
Benno Ejnisman

A 9-year-old girl presented to the emergency department reporting intense pain and inability to bear weight on her left foot after a classmate tripped over it. Imaging studies confirmed a fracture of the cuboid bone due to compression of the lateral column of the foot (also known as nutcracker fracture). The patient was treated surgically, with direct reduction of the compression fracture and definitive fixation with two Kirschner wires. Cuboid nutcracker fracture is rare in children and adolescents, and potential consequences can occur if it is not correctly diagnosed and adequately managed. Literature on this type of fracture is scarce, along with information on treatment options and results over medium-term and long-term follow-up. We describe this case and review the literature on this particular topic.


2021 ◽  
pp. 082585972110393
Author(s):  
Hon Wai Benjamin Cheng

While the whole population is at risk from infection with the coronavirus, older people—often frail and subject to multimorbidity—are at the highest risk for the severe and fatal disease. Despite strict infection control and social distancing measures, frail adults in long-term care facilities may be at particular risk of transmission of respiratory illness. Treatment decisions are often complex attributed to the heterogeneity of this population with regards to different geriatric domains such as functional status, comorbidity, and poly-pharmacy. While measures must be taken to prevent the novel coronavirus from spreading through these facilities, it is also essential that residents with coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) have access to the symptom management and support they want and deserve. What most nursing home residents want during the course of their illness is to be able to stay in their facilities, to be surrounded by the people they love most, and to feel relief from their physical and emotional pain. By addressing the limited access to hospice and palliative care delivery in nursing homes, we can prevent unnecessary suffering and pain from COVID-19 as well as lay the groundwork for improving care for all residents moving forward.


2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (05) ◽  
pp. 1135-1143
Author(s):  
Amalie Dyda ◽  
Magid Fahim ◽  
Jon Fraser ◽  
Marianne Kirrane ◽  
Ides Wong ◽  
...  

Abstract Background The COVID-19 pandemic has forced rapid digital transformation of many health systems. These innovations are now entering the literature, but there is little focus on the resulting disruption. Objective We describe the implementation of digital innovations during the COVID-19 response of Australia's largest health service, Metro North (in Brisbane, Queensland), the challenges of the subsequent digital disruption, how these were managed, and lessons learned. Methods Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, the Australian state of Queensland created the Queensland Digital Clinical Charter, which provides guidance for the development of digital health programs. The guidelines utilize three horizons: digitizing workflows, leveraging digital data to transform clinical care, and reimagining new and innovative models of care. The technical response to COVID-19 in Metro North is described across these horizons. The rapid digital response caused significant disruption to health care delivery; management of the disruption and the outcomes are detailed. This is a participatory action research project, with members of the research team assisting with leading the implementation project informing the case report content. Results Several digital innovations were introduced across Metro North during the COVID-19 response. This resulted in significant disruption creating digital hypervigilance, digital deceleration, data discordance, and postdigital “depression.” Successful management of the digital disruption minimized the negative effects of rapid digital transformation, and contributed to the effective management of the pandemic in Queensland. Conclusion The rapid digital transformation in Metro North during COVID-19 was successful in several aspects; however, ongoing challenges remain. These include the need to improve data sharing and increase interoperability. Importantly, the innovations need to be evaluated to ensure that Metro North can capitalize on these changes and incorporate them into long-term routine practice. Moving forward, it will be essential to manage not only the pandemic, but increasingly, the resultant digital disruption.


2018 ◽  
Vol 3 (11) ◽  
pp. 574-583 ◽  
Author(s):  
Georgios Kyriakopoulos ◽  
Lazaros Poultsides ◽  
Panayiotis Christofilopoulos

Total hip arthroplasty through an anterior approach has been increasing in popularity amongst surgeons and patients. Anterior approach hip arthroplasty seems to offer improved early outcomes in terms of pain, rehabilitation and length of stay. No difference in long-term outcomes has been shown between anterior and posterior or lateral approaches. Proper formal training, utilization of fluoroscopy and adequate experience can mitigate risks of complications and improve early and medium-term outcomes. Cite this article: EFORT Open Rev 2018;3:574-583. DOI: 10.1302/2058-5241.3.180023.


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