Modeling the Diffusion of Psychological Stress

Stress reduces quality of life and causes many diseases. Nevertheless, it is not completely clear whether stress transmission may involve acquaintances and other people in addition to lovers, friends, and relatives. More generally, it is not clear how stress spreads among the population and how its diffusion in a society can be estimated. This chapter presents a set of mathematical and computational models that can be used to approach the modeling of psychological stress diffusion.

Cloud Bioinformatics in a Private Cloud Deployment

This chapter describes service portability for a private cloud deployment, including a detailed case study about Cloud Bioinformatics services developed as part of the Cloud Computing Adoption Framework (CCAF). The Cloud Bioinformatics design and deployment is based on Storage Area Network (SAN) technologies, details of which include functionalities, technical implementation, architecture, and user support. Bioinformatics applications are written on the SAN-based private cloud, which can simulate complex biological sciences and present them in a way that anyone without prior knowledge can understand. Several bioinformatics results are discussed, particularly brain segmentation, which demonstrates different parts of the brain simulated by the private cloud. In addition, benefits of CCAF are illustrated using several bioinformatics examples such as tumour modelling, brain imaging, insulin molecules, and simulations for medical training. The Cloud Bioinformatics solution offers cost reduction, time-saving, and user friendliness.

Migrant Women

Women across the world migrate for a wide range of reasons. Some gravitate to towns and cities in their own countries seeking safety, education, health care, and employment opportunities. Others cross international boundaries, fleeing from the atrocities of war and extreme poverty. Migration within countries is also on the rise, as people move seeking resources, services, education, and employment opportunities. In addition, they may want to escape from violence or natural disasters. This movement of people from rural to urban areas has resulted in an explosive growth of cities around the globe. Women migrate to enhance their life experiences and that of their children and kinsfolk. This chapter draws on a research case study undertaken with the Kewapi language group in Port Moresby and the Batri Villages of the Southern Highlands in Papua New Guinea. It highlights the perspectives of women migrating from their home communities in order to seek education and health care. It explores the implications for developing user-focused health care systems designed to meet the needs of mobile and vulnerable women. The study suggests that if women and their families from remote rural communities participate in health promoting initiatives, they can dramatically improve their life and health experiences and that of their community.

E-Collaboration in Biomedical Research

There are compelling arguments for using emerging Web technologies to facilitate research in the biomedical sciences. This chapter reviews current research and current technologies for e-collaboration in biomedical research. This chapter presents four case studies examining the use of Web-based tools to support the teamwork of geographically distributed biomedical researchers. It then reviews case study findings in light of the Web 2.0 e-collaboration enablers that are available. It concludes with surprising and concerning reflections about current practices in biomedical research collaboration as well as some promising future directions through the use of biomedical informatics to advance these practices by addressing human factors.

Doing the Right Things Right or the Wrong Things Well

The measurement and evaluation of healthcare services’ quality is faced with the challenge of describing its appropriateness. Is the right service rendered for the specific disease? Or do our measures quantify the efficiency of producing these services without first assessing if they were needed? Eventually, it is a question of accountability about the processes and outcomes of the care, which are expected to both demonstrate the social responsibilities of health care professionals and gauge the expectations of patients, families, and communities. The purpose of this chapter is to explore the determinants of what and why patients expect from healthcare and caring. Within the concept of accountability, the role of physicians as educators rather than exclusively healers of disease is explored.

Application of the Cloud Computing for the Effective Implementation of the Medical Information System

The field of healthcare informatics is rapidly evolving. The new models and protocols of Medical Information System (MIS) are developed. Despite obvious advantages and benefits, practical application of MIS in everyday practice is slow. Cloud computing have emerged as an important new field, distinguished from conventional distributed computing by its focus on large-scale sharing, innovative applications, and, in some cases, high-performance orientation. “Cloud computing” is defined as flexible, secure, coordinated resource sharing among dynamic collections of individuals, institutions, and resources. Cloud computing is a new way of delivering computing resources and services. It is plausible that this technology has more potential and can improve health care services, benefit health care research, and change the face of health information technology. This can be a solution for widespread and effective implementation of the medical information system. The present chapter discusses the application of cloud computing for the medical information system practical usage. The ideal of healthcare in the information age must be to create knowledge from medical information and less time managing medical information and data. The application of easily available and adaptable technology and improvement of the infrastructure conditions is the basis for medical informatics applications. The usage of MIS holds the potential to improve, develop, and realize medical service in the effective and comprehensive mode.

Indicating Fields of Inequalities Regarding the Access to Health Benefits

Restrictions to health services in Poland inspired the establishment of the Watch Health Care Foundation (WHC). The fundamental disease of the system is the disproportion between the amount of the funds and the contents of the package. It causes the same “symptoms” and leads to the same pathological phenomena everywhere: queues and other forms of rationing (“guaranteed”) health benefits, corruption, and making use of privileges. The foundation uses the potential of the information society and available infrastructure (Web portal, www.watchealthcare.eu), and all activities are presented on the Website with the aim of influencing the health care system. On the basis of reports of limited access to health services, a registry of patient problems was created in the WHC Web portal, which aims to show what the biggest gaps in access to health services are – this is a way of showing the patient and health care system the needs and also one possible approach to continuous education of the health care service consumers targeted at health care system improvement.

A New Space for Biotechnology Innovation?

New technological opportunities and online communication constantly gain importance for knowledge integration and knowledge creation in any innovation-driven environment. The cooperation between firms and individual actors in biotechnology was characteristically organized in local or regional clusters, based on face-to-face communications and strategic temporary linkages to other clusters. However, this archetypal configuration can change with the emerging use of open innovation models such as online research communities. A qualitative case study including an analysis of forums within an open source biomedical research platform portrays how knowledge integration mechanisms, and hence, innovations are implemented in virtual space. In this newly created environment, a number of geographical patterns are inverted: The strong role of physical co-location is partly substituted by enabled online proximity and new opportunities of virtual “prototype-sharing”; the former global pipelines are transformed to local and virtual cross-community pipelines. Yet mechanisms of creating social coherence and stability illustrate noteworthy similarities with “localized capabilities” of regional agglomerations. Eventually, knowledge integration capabilities ensure that the network can operate as a successful knowledge provider.

Diffusion of Innovations

In this chapter, the authors discuss the use of diffusion of innovations as a foundational theory for research in the medical informatics discipline. They performed a meta-analysis to examine the enduring efficacy of the tenets of diffusion of innovations. Then, they performed a content analysis to examine over 2,000 journal articles from the fields of medical informatics, medicine, and information systems. The authors found that tenets of diffusion of innovations theory were prevalent in much of the literature and that the relationships proposed by diffusion of innovations theory have remained significant in the empirical literature. Although several theories are useful in explaining phenomenon in the domain of medical informatics, diffusion of innovation is one such theory that can be applicable to a vast amount of medical informatics research focused on new technologies or work processes, and the authors suggest that scholars use and/or synthesize it with additional theory to provide a foundation for future research in this area.

A Cognitive Machine-Learning System to Discover Syndromes in Erythemato-Squamous Diseases

A syndrome is a set of typical clinical features that appear together often enough to suggest they may represent a single, as yet unknown, disease. The discovery of syndromes and relative taxonomy formation is the critical early phase of the process of scientific discovery in the medical domain. The author proposes a machine learning system to discover syndromes (seen as prototypes of clinical cases) that is based on the Eleanor Rosch’s prototype theory on how the human mind categorizes and infers prototypes from observations. A comparison on a case study in erythemato-squamous diseases of the proposed system against three hierarchical clustering algorithms shows that the system obtains performances which are averagely better. The system implemented can be considered a “scientific discovery support system” because it can discover unknown syndromes to the advantage of research activities and syndromic surveillance.