The problem of the study was to establish valid criteria for evaluating health-related World Wide Web [WWW] sites. From a table of specifications, a pool of 39 items was developed into a Criteria List. A nine member jury of experts composed of professionals from the discipline of Library and Information Science was used to determine content validity of the items. The items on the Criteria List were sent to the expert panel of jurors for the first review. To determine which items would be retained, revised or eliminated, the items were subjected to both a quantitative and qualitative review. The revised Criteria List was then sent to the expert panel of jurors for the second review. Responses from the second review were also subjected to qualitative and quantitative analysis. However, this time the quantitative review included the use of the Content-Validity Ratio [CVR]. All items on the Criteria List that were not statistically significant at p <.05 were eliminated. The final Criteria List contained 27 items from the 39 originally proposed items. / Department of Physiology and Health Science

The evolution of e-health has the potential to assist in the management of scarce resources and the shortage of skills, enhance efficiencies, improve quality and increase work productivity within the healthcare sector. As a result, an increase is seen in e-health solutions developments with the aim to improve healthcare services, hospital information systems, health decision support, telemedicine and other technical systems that have the potential to reduce cost, improve quality, and enhance the accessibility and delivery of healthcare. However, unfortunately their implementation contiues to fail. Although there are several reasons for this, in this study a lack of project quality management is viewed as a key contributor to the failure of e-health solutions implementation projects in rural hospitals. This results in neglected aspects of quality assurance (QA), which forms an integral part of project quality management. The purpose of this study is to develop a Genertic Quality Assurance Model (GQAM) for the successful acquisition (i.e. development and implementation) of e-health solutions in rural hospitals in the Eastern Cape Province to enable improved quality of care and service delivery. In order to develop and test this model it was necessary to identify the QA methodologies that are currently used in rural hospitals and to evaluate their strengths and weaknesses, as well as their impact on project success. The study is divided into four phases; in each phase different study designs were followed. The study used triangulation of qualitative and some elements of quantitative research approaches, in terms of which a case study approach was adpoted to answer the research questions. This study did indeed develop a GQAM that can be used to ensure e-health solution success in rural hospitals. Furthermore, to aid in the implementation of this model, a set of QA value chain implementation guidelines were developed, as a framework, to inject the nodel into typical (SDLC) phases.

The goal of San Bernardino County Medical Information Resource is to develop, coordinate, and implement a centralized information and referral database that contains information about health and human services provided by public and private entities throughtout the county of San Bernardino and is accessible to the public via the Internet.

The World Wide Web has become a significant source of medical information for the public, but there is concern that much of the information is inaccurate, misleading, and unsupported by scientific evidence. This study analyzes the validity of health claims on the World Wide Web for the herbal Opuntia using an evidence-based approach, and supports the observation that individuals must critically assess health information in this relatively new medium of communication. A systematic search by means of nine search engines and online resources of Web sites relating to herbal remedies was conducted and specific sites providing information on the cactus herbal remedy from the genus Opuntia were retrieved. Validity of therapeutic health claims on the Web sites was checked by comparison with reports in the scientific literature subjected to two established quality assessment rating instruments. 184 Web sites from a variety of sources were retrieved and evaluated, and 98 distinct health claims were identified. 53 scientific reports were retrieved to validate claims. 25 involved human subjects, and 28 involved animal or laboratory models. Only 33 (34%) of the claims were addressed in the scientific literature. For 3% of the claims, evidence from the scientific reports was conflicting or contradictory. Of the scientific reports involving human subjects, none met the predefined criteria for high quality as determined by quality assessment rating instruments. Two-thirds of the claims were unsupported by scientific evidence and were based on folklore, or indirect evidence from related sources. Information on herbal remedies such as Opuntia is well represented on the World Wide Web. Health claims on Web sites were numerous and varied widely in subject matter. The determination of the validity of information about claims made for herbals on the Web would help individuals assess their value in medical treatment. However, the Web is conducive to dubious health information and individuals should exercise caution in accepting health claims unsupported by scientific evidence.

Rural communities have limited access to health information which is made available on the internet. This is due to poor infrastructure (i.e., lack of clinics or Internet access) and that gives them problems in accessing information within the domain of health. The availability of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) in a rural community can provide the community with a number of beneficial solutions to their problems as they maximize the potential of knowledge sharing and delivery. This research seeks to make use of ICTs deployed in the community of Dwesa, in order to contribute to improving the health standards of the community. It seeks to accomplish this by carrying out an investigation and literature review with the aim of understanding health knowledge sharing dynamics in the context of marginalized communities. The knowledge acquired will then be used in the development and implementation of a semantic web-based e-Health portal as part of the Siyakhula Living Lab (SLL) project. This portal will share and deliver western medical knowledge, traditional knowledge and indigenous knowledge. This research seeks to make use of a combination of Free and/or Open Sources Software in developing the portal to make it affordable to the community.

Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) / The literature corresponding to disordered proteins has been on a rise. As the number of publications increase, the time and effort needed to manually identify the relevant publications and protein information to add to centralized repository (called DisProt) is becoming arduous and critical. Existing search facilities on PubMed can retrieve a seemingly large number of publications based on keywords and does not have any support for ranking them based on the probability of the protein names mentioned in a given abstract being added to DisProt. This thesis explores a novel system of using disorder predictors and context based dictionary methods to quickly identify publications on disordered proteins from the PubMed database. NLProt, which is built around Support Vector Machines, is used to identify protein names and PONDR-FIT which is an Artificial Neural Network based meta- predictor is used for identifying protein disorder. The work done in this thesis is of immediate significance in identifying disordered protein names. We have tested the new system on 100 abstracts from DisProt [these abstracts were found to be relevant to disordered proteins and were added to DisProt manually by the annotators.] This system had an accuracy of 87% on this test set. We then took another 100 recently added abstracts from PubMed and ran our algorithm on them. This time it had an accuracy of 68%. We suggested improvements to increase the accuracy and believe that this system can be applied for identifying disordered proteins from literature.

The major socio-economic development challenges facing most African countries include economic diversification, poverty, unemployment, diseases and the unsustainable use of natural resources. The challenge of quality healthcare provisioning is compounded by the HIV/AIDS pandemic in Sub Saharan Africa. However, there is a great potential in using electronic healthcare (e-health) as one of the supportive systems within the healthcare sector to address these pressing challenges facing healthcare systems in developing countries, including solving inequalities in healthcare delivery between rural and urban hospitals/clinics. The purpose of this study was to compile a Provincial E-health Framework (PEHF) based on the feedback from electronic healthcare readiness assessments conducted in selected rural and urban hospitals/clinics in the North West Province in South Africa. The e-healthcare readiness assessment was conducted in the light of effective use of ICT in patient healthcare record system, consultation among healthcare professionals, prescription of medication, referral of patients and training of healthcare professionals in ICT usage. The study was divided into two phases which were phases 1 and 2 and a qualitative design supported by a case study approach was used. Data were collected using different techniques to enhance triangulation of data. The techniques included group interviews, qualitative questionnaires, photographs, document analysis and expert opinions. The outcome of the assessment led to the compilation of the PEHF which was based on Service Oriented Architecture (SOA). SOA was chosen to integrate the hospitals/clinics‟ ICT infrastructure yet allowing each hospital/clinic the autonomy to control its own ICT environment. To assist hospitals/clinics integrate their ICT resources, this research study proposed an Infrastructure Network Architecture which clustered hospitals/clinics to share common ICT infrastructure instead of duplicating these resources. Furthermore, processes of the e-health services (e-patient health IV record system, e-consultation system, e-prescription system, e-referral system and e-training system) were provided to assist in the implementation of the PEHF. Finally, a set of guidelines were provided by the research study to aid the implementation of the PEHF.