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Institute
Background:
Contact tracing apps are potentially useful tools for supporting national COVID-19 containment strategies. Various national apps with different technical design features have been commissioned and issued by governments worldwide.
Objective:
Our goal was to develop and propose an item set that was suitable for describing and monitoring nationally issued COVID-19 contact tracing apps. This item set could provide a framework for describing the key technical features of such apps and monitoring their use based on widely available information.
Methods:
We used an open-source intelligence approach (OSINT) to access a multitude of publicly available sources and collect data and information regarding the development and use of contact tracing apps in different countries over several months (from June 2020 to January 2021). The collected documents were then iteratively analyzed via content analysis methods. During this process, an initial set of subject areas were refined into categories for evaluation (ie, coherent topics), which were then examined for individual features. These features were paraphrased as items in the form of questions and applied to information materials from a sample of countries (ie, Brazil, China, Finland, France, Germany, Italy, Singapore, South Korea, Spain, and the United Kingdom [England and Wales]). This sample was purposefully selected; our intention was to include the apps of different countries from around the world and to propose a valid item set that can be relatively easily applied by using an OSINT approach.
Results:
Our OSINT approach and subsequent analysis of the collected documents resulted in the definition of the following five main categories and associated subcategories: (1) background information (open-source code, public information, and collaborators); (2) purpose and workflow (secondary data use and warning process design); (3) technical information (protocol, tracing technology, exposure notification system, and interoperability); (4) privacy protection (the entity of trust and anonymity); and (5) availability and use (release date and the number of downloads). Based on this structure, a set of items that constituted the evaluation framework were specified. The application of these items to the 10 selected countries revealed differences, especially with regard to the centralization of the entity of trust and the overall transparency of the apps’ technical makeup.
Conclusions:
We provide a set of criteria for monitoring and evaluating COVID-19 tracing apps that can be easily applied to publicly issued information. The application of these criteria might help governments to identify design features that promote the successful, widespread adoption of COVID-19 tracing apps among target populations and across national boundaries.
Background:
Large health organizations often struggle to build complex health information technology (HIT) solutions and are faced with ever-growing pressure to continuously innovate their information systems. Limited research has been conducted that explores the relationship between organizations’ innovative capabilities and HIT quality in the sense of achieving high-quality support for patient care processes.
Objective:
The aim of this study is to explain how core constructs of organizational innovation capabilities are linked to HIT quality based on a conceptual sociotechnical model on innovation and quality of HIT, called the IQHIT model, to help determine how better information provision in health organizations can be achieved.
Methods:
We designed a survey to assess various domains of HIT quality, innovation capabilities of health organizations, and context variables and administered it to hospital chief information officers across Austria, Germany, and Switzerland. Data from 232 hospitals were used to empirically fit the model using partial least squares structural equation modeling to reveal associations and mediating and moderating effects.
Results:
The resulting empirical IQHIT model reveals several associations between the analyzed constructs, which can be summarized in 2 main insights. First, it illustrates the linkage between the constructs measuring HIT quality by showing that the professionalism of information management explains the degree of HIT workflow support (R²=0.56), which in turn explains the perceived HIT quality (R²=0.53). Second, the model shows that HIT quality was positively influenced by innovation capabilities related to the top management team, the information technology department, and the organization at large. The assessment of the model’s statistical quality criteria indicated valid model specifications, including sufficient convergent and discriminant validity for measuring the latent constructs that underlie the measures of HIT quality and innovation capabilities.
Conclusions:
The proposed sociotechnical IQHIT model points to the key role of professional information management for HIT workflow support in patient care and perceived HIT quality from the viewpoint of hospital chief information officers. Furthermore, it highlights that organizational innovation capabilities, particularly with respect to the top management team, facilitate HIT quality and suggests that health organizations establish this link by applying professional information management practices. The model may serve to stimulate further scientific work in the field of HIT adoption and diffusion and to provide practical guidance to managers, policy makers, and educators on how to achieve better patient care using HIT.
The effects of reaction parameters on Hurn:xwiley:23670932:media:cptc202000216:cptc202000216-math-0001 production from ethanol photocatalysis in the gas phase have been investigated. The photocatalytic activity evolves from an early mass‐transfer limited regime to an independent one at later irradiation times, which is interpreted in terms of a photocatalytic site activity distribution. Ethanol molar fraction exhibits two different domains, with Hurn:xwiley:23670932:media:cptc202000216:cptc202000216-math-0002 production increasing up to a molar fraction of 0.12, beyond which it plateaus. Hurn:xwiley:23670932:media:cptc202000216:cptc202000216-math-0003 :AcH ratios are very sensitive to reaction conditions, reaching 1.8 at low reactant flows. UV light is converted to Hurn:x-wiley:23670932:media:cptc202000216:cptc202000216-math-0004 with an efficiency of nearly 3 %.
The study addresses staffing and workforce issues for home‐ and community‐based long‐term care in Germany. It is based on a study aimed at developing staffing recommendations for home‐care provider organisations. The study was commissioned within the regulation of the German long‐term care act. Following an exploratory literature search on staffing issues in home‐ and community‐based care qualitative interviews with 30 experts in home care were conducted. In addition, time needed for different interventions in homes of people in need of care (n = 129) was measured. Ethical approval for the study was obtained. The literature on the topic is limited. In Germany, no fixed staff‐to‐client ratio exists, but staffing is determined primarily by reimbursement policies, not by care recipients’ needs. The results of the interviews indicated that staffing ratios are not the main concern of home‐care providers. Experts stressed that general availability of staff with different qualification levels and the problems of existing regulation on services and their reimbursement are of higher concern. The measurement of time needed for selected interventions reveals the huge heterogeneity of home‐care service delivery and the difficulty of using a task‐based approach to determine staffing levels. Overall, the study shows that currently demand for home‐care exceeds supply. Staff shortage puts a risk to home care in Germany. Existing approaches of reimbursement‐driven determination of staffing levels have not been sufficient. A new balance between staffing, needs and reimbursement policies needs to be developed.
Rationale:
Biomechanical analyses are capable of capturing and evaluating human motions. In addition to the major biomechanical fields of kinetics and kinematics, electromyography (EMG) provides a reliable way to analyse neuromuscular activities, e.g. inter- and intramuscular coordination, fatigue behavior or timing. Based on these parameters it is possible to conclude to clinically relevant parameters such as motor control, muscular coordination or compensation strategies with different loads. In addition to this, EMG can be used in treatment itself, e.g. biofeedback-training with an EMG is an effective and evidenced based tool to improve neuromuscular control.
Purpose:
To show the importance of EMG in musicians´ health and to demonstrate additional therapy and diagnostic options.
Educational Objectives:
At the end of the workshop, the participants will be able to…
1. understand and describe the basic principles of EMG
2. understand and describe the importance of EMG in the context of musicians´ health, physical therapy and the clinical reasoning process
3. use EMG on musicians in the performance process
Content of Presentation:
This workshop briefly introduces the theoretical principles of EMG and the clinical applications in the context of musicians´ health. It explains why EMG provides an additional value in the clinical reasoning process and supports the therapist, but decision making in the clinical reasoning process should never be based on EMG solely.
In the further course of the workshop the use of EMG in diagnostics and therapy (biofeedback) with musicians is practically demonstrated and discussed with the participants.
Approach of Presentation:
1. Short presentation: introduction and understanding of EMG (educational objective 1)
2. Short case presentation of a musician to introduce EMG in the field of musicians´ health and the clinical reasoning process (educational objective 2)
3. Interactive practical demonstration (diagnosis and biofeedback-training) as the central part of the workshop. Questions and comments will be discussed directly throughout the group (educational objective 3)
Clinical Significance:
EMG based functional neuromuscular diagnostics and biofeedback-training provides both the therapist as well as the musician with additional value in their clinical work.
Possessing skills in social and intercultural interaction is vitally important for employees who work in globalized environments, especially as people's working lives tend to involve an increasingly large amount of service-related activities. As a consequence, universities offer cultural studies courses and strive to enable their students to study abroad for a period of time. However, there is still no widely shared agreement on how intercultural experiences and cultural preparation courses predict the perception, thinking and acting of individuals. Therefore, the study at hand uses a cross-sectional design with N = 430 participants in order to investigate whether students of cultural studies gain more intercultural competencies during the time spent studying abroad, compared to studies of other subjects. The results reveal that students of cultural subjects show significantly higher levels of cultural empathy and openness in the post hoc measurement, even though there was no interaction effect with the amount of time spent studying abroad. Length of stay abroad had a significant indirect effect on social competence via all the dimensions of the Multicultural Personality Questionnaire. Moreover, results indicate that flexibility to adapt one's behaviour to cultural norms may predict problems when returning to one's home country.
The political geography of central government debt has hardly been investigated. We propose a method for calculating implicit interregional transfers stemming from central government debt.
We apply this method to Belgium over the 1970-2016 period. The share of poorer Francophone Belgium in debt-financed central government spending was persistently larger than its share in central government revenue used to pay the resulting interest bills. The opposite holds for richer Flanders. Also, a primary deficit in one particular year leads to an interest bill in each of the following years as long as debt caused by that primary deficit is not repaid. All the above caused debt-related transfers from Flanders to Francophone Belgium of over 7% of Flemish GDP during many years.
Interregional interest transfers may also be large in the many other democracies suffering from both high central government debt and considerable geographic income disparities.
The size of these transfers may in turn explain the size and persistence of central government deficits. This is also because poorer, less densely populated regions such as Francophone Belgium tend to be overrepresented within central governments. This strengthens their ability to cause deficits.
We recommend more fiscal decentralisation or at least smaller central government deficits.
Objectives: This study aimed at the construction of what the core of eHealth policy making is, offering new perspectives about high priority procedures along the policy making process
Methods: Following Grounded Theory methodology, 59 qualitative telephone interviews with a broad variety of stakeholders from Austria, Switzerland and Germany were conducted
Results: The findings hinted at five priorities of eHealth policy making: strategy, consensus-building, decision-making, implementation and evaluation that emerged from the stakeholders’ perception of the eHealth policy. Hereby strategy, consensus-building and implementation gained the highest attention
Conclusions: These findings suggest three high priorities in eHealth policy: 1) developing and pursuing a consistent eHealth strategy, 2) investing time and resources into consensus-building to clear up difficulties early on in the process, 3) governing implementation towards serving patient care through systems fit for practice.
Public Interest Summary: Digitalisation is playing an increasingly crucial role in providing high quality health care. However, different countries have pursued different political paths. In this study, we wanted to know how the stakeholders perceived the political process in their country to identify strengths and weaknesses. We, therefore, conducted interviews about digital health policy with experts from Austria, Switzerland and Germany covering the full spectrum of stakeholders. The findings suggest three political musts: 1) a convincing and coherent strategy followed throughout the entire process, 2) consensus- building among the stakeholders, 3) using “fit for practice” as the yardstick to measure political success.
Rationale:
Biomechanical analyses are capable of capturing and evaluating human motions. In addition to the major biomechanical fields of kinetics and kinematics, electromyography (EMG) provides a reliable way to analyse neuromuscular activities, e.g. inter- and intramuscular coordination, fatigue behavior or timing. Based on these parameters it is possible to conclude to clinically relevant parameters such as motor control, muscular coordination or compensation strategies with different loads. In addition to this, EMG can be used in treatment itself, e.g. biofeedback-training with an EMG is an effective and evidenced based tool to improve neuromuscular control.
Purpose:
To show the importance of EMG in musicians´ health and to demonstrate additional therapy and diagnostic options.
Educational Objectives:
At the end of the workshop, the participants will be able to…
1. understand and describe the basic principles of EMG
2. understand and describe the importance of EMG in the context of musicians´ health, physical therapy and the clinical reasoning process
3. use EMG on musicians in the performance process
Content of Presentation:
This workshop briefly introduces the theoretical principles of EMG and the clinical applications in the context of musicians´ health. It explains why EMG provides an additional value in the clinical reasoning process and supports the therapist, but decision making in the clinical reasoning process should never be based on EMG solely.
In the further course of the workshop the use of EMG in diagnostics and therapy (biofeedback) with musicians is practically demonstrated and discussed with the participants.
Approach of Presentation:
1. Short presentation: introduction and understanding of EMG (educational objective 1)
2. Short case presentation of a musician to introduce EMG in the field of musicians´ health and the clinical reasoning process (educational objective 2)
3. Interactive practical demonstration (diagnosis and biofeedback-training) as the central part of the workshop. Questions and comments will be discussed directly throughout the group (educational objective 3)
Clinical Significance:
EMG based functional neuromuscular diagnostics and biofeedback-training provides both the therapist as well as the musician with additional value in their clinical work.
Animal husbandry methods also play an important role in public discussion, as animal welfare is often valued in society by visual perceptions. In this context, there is often an idealized idea of livestock husbandry and nutrition, which is staged by ideal-typical images. In the minds of many citizens, nature-loving images trigger a positive imagination that results from the longings of urban living conditions. Media and stakeholder analyses indicate that the use of straw in livestock husbandry and nutrition also has a positive impact on the welfare of livestock. According to this, straw is preferred by the public for more animal welfare. But what is not considered is the fact that the straw must be of impeccable hygienic quality
Due to the resource-constrained nature of embedded systems, it is crucial to support the estimation of their power consumption as early in the development process as possible. Non-functional requirements based on power consumption directly impact the software design, e.g., watt-hour thresholds and expected lifetimes based on battery capacities. Even if software affects hardware behavior directly, these types of requirements are often overlooked by software developers because they are commonly associated with the hardware layer. Modern trends in software engineering such as Model-Driven Development (MDD) can be used in embedded software development to evaluate power consumption-based requirements in early design phases. However, power consumption aspects are currently not sufficiently considered in MDD approaches. In this paper, we present a model-driven approach using Unified Modeling Language profile extensions to model hardware components and their power characteristics. Software m odels are combined with hardware models to achieve a system-wide estimation, including peripheral devices, and to make the power-related impact in early design stages visible. By deriving energy profiles, we provide software developers with valuable feedback, which may be used to identify energy bugs and evaluate power consumption-related requirements. To demonstrate the potential of our approach, we use a sensor node example to evaluate our concept and to identify its energy bugs.
This paper provides a discourse based upon the key development of nursing in response to the emerging 4Ds of health technology re-design. Building informatics capability among health professionals is a workforce issue necessitated through the increasing prevalence of information technology and digitization of healthcare affecting the entire health workforce, specifically front-line nurses. The key concepts will be explored of Digitization, Distribution, Disruption and Diversity, a framework recognising the tsunami of technology such as Big Data analytics, comprehensive decision support systems for nursing, nanobots, robotics, and pharmacogenomics and the impact these have upon the nursing workforce.
Building on Rogers’ Diffusion of Innovation Theory, Bass models describe the diffusion processes distinguishing between innovation (p) and imitation (q). This study aimed at modelling the uptake of RIS, PACS and EHR systems in Germany and Finland. The Bass models revealed a quick and almost identical uptake process across all three systems for Finland. In contrast, the Bass models mirrored a slower uptake in Germany. Consequently, the Finnish “imitation” coefficients were larger than the German ones. While in Germany almost free market forces were driving the adoption through imitation but without tail wind from policy, the adoption process in Finland was centrally governed. This suggests that the diffusion process in Finland reflected a well-managed roll-out of the systems rather than imitation behaviour. Thus, in order for Bass model coefficients to be understood properly, additional contextual information is required.
Access to digital technologies depends on the availability of technical infrastructure, but this access is unequally distributed among social groups and newly summarized under the term digital divide. The aim is to analyze the perception of a tracing app to contain Covid-19 in Germany. The results showed that participants with the highest level of formal education rate the app as beneficial and were the most likely to use the app.
This qualitative study focuses on assessing the “future readiness” capacity of three Peruvian Higher Education Institutions under the HEInnovate framework. The main question guiding this research is: To what extent can Peruvian universities be considered entrepreneurial and ready
for tackling the Challenges of the Future? The Challenges of the Future are understood as the challenges generated by concepts such as The Future of Work, The Global Skills Gap, Employability and unexpected and destabilizing risks of the environment, such as COVID-19.
Universities were studied based on 4 research sub-questions: 1) How do Peruvian HEIs rate in Entrepreneurial Capacity according to the HEInnovate framework? 2) What are the factors supporting or preventing Peruvian HEIs to accomplish their entrepreneurial potential? 3) What efforts are Peruvian HEIs making for developing 21st century skills, accomplishing Digital Transformation, and enhancing their students Employability? and 4) What measures could Peruvian HEIs take in order to maximize their entrepreneurial and future-proof potential? The research methodology used was mixed, applying first a quantitative assessment, and then
complementing the results with in-depth interviews. After presenting the conclusions, recommendations for policy action and for university management are given.
Professionalization in low-threshold drug aid : between managerialism and practitioner knowledge
(2021)
Developing organizations
(2021)
This chapter reviews organizational development (OD) as networked man-agerial practices and investigates the role these practices play in contemporary strategic management and in management communication. Our analytical overview of studies finds that the literature lacks empirical evidence on the linguistic properties of OD’s practices as these properties have not been researched in OD but in settings where change is solely approached as a planned process. To fill this gap, we propose a research framework to inquire into OD’s verbal, paraverbal, and nonverbal practices. After a tour d’horizon of OD’s and change management’s ontological and epistemological paradigms, we outline the implications of the practice perspective of OD for strategic management, then narrow our focus to empirical studies’ prominent out-comes on discursive practices in change processes, and conclude with a framework for future research