Barriers in communicating medication changes at hospital discharge: Informing CancelRx design requirements

Objectives This operational study aims to investigate the barriers in communicating medication changes at hospital discharge, and to inform design requirements of the CancelRx functionality to better support the communication. Methods We conducted seven semi-structured interviews with inpatient prescribers at an urban academic medical center. The interview protocol was framed from a human factors perspective, specifically the work system design approach. We took notes of the interviews and identified the initial themes of system barriers that may impact patient safety. Results Medication changes need to be communicated to multiple stakeholders. We identified two initial themes of the system barriers: the lack of an information flow that connects all the involved stakeholders, and the difficulties to communicate key pieces of information. We identified three key pieces of information that are difficult to communicate: the discontinuation reasons, the notification urgency, and the duration of changes. Conclusions While the CancelRx functionality can facilitate the communication (e.g. prescribers no longer need to call pharmacists when a medication is discontinued), enhancements are needed to address the system barriers. We proposed enhanced design requirements of the CancelRx functionality, e.g., to allow users to specify a reason for a medication discontinuation and transmit the reasons to other stakeholders, to indicate the urgency of notification, to specify the duration of a change, and to receive system status feedback .

Noise Characteristic Analysis of Multi-Port Network in Phased Array Radar

Noise figure and noise power are detailedly analyzed and deduced in theory for multi-port network in active phased array radar. The mathematical expressions of output noise power and noise figure of network are given out under various conditions. Accordingly, this provides a basis of theories for multi-port network and radar receiver system design, the test method of array noise figure. Finally, two application examples are given to verify the accuracy of the formulae. Making use of these formulas, the designer can use to calculate the dynamic range of the radar receive system, and the designer can also constitute a measure scheme of the array noise figure for active phased array radar.

A Novel Transmit–Receive System of Frequency Diverse Array Radar for Multitarget Localization

The frequency diverse array (FDA) has drawn substantial attention because it provides a new degree of freedom. However, the multitarget localization is fundamentally limited by the range-angle-coupled and range-periodic beampattern of the basic FDA. It has been suggested to design a special FDA configuration to localize targets, but seldom of the existing works consider the design both in transmitting and receiving. In this paper, a transmit–receive system of FDA radar is proposed for the multitarget localization. In order to decouple the beampattern in the range and angle domains, the configurations of subarray-based FDA (SB-FDA) and full-band FDA (FB-FDA) are chosen as transmitter and receiver, respectively. In such a system framework, the receive beamwidth in range domain is only a quarter of the transmission. Then, two typical multitarget scenarios, sparse targets and unresolved targets, are both considered in the multitarget localization. For sparse targets, a proper frequency increment is selected to control the range-periodic transmit and receive mainlobes to focus on a single target, besides being staggered with others. In this way, multitarget localization is achieved in different pulses with monopulse processing. For unresolved targets, a method of intra-pulse beam scanning is proposed to localize each target with little interference from others. We also analyze the system performance in Cramér-Rao lower bound (CRLB) of localization and output signal to interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR). Several simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed transmit–receive system in multitarget localization.