A study was done of the attendance of 1,251 non-handicapped and 131 handicapped pupils in the Weber County, Ogden, Utah School District. This study was done at the request of the district administration. The basic questions were 1) would there be a difference in attendance of the handicapped and the non-handicapped and 2) would the reasons for absence differ as stated on excuses presented to the office. Data for the entire 1978-79 school year were tallied and analyzed. There were no significant differences in the attendance rates of the two groups. Inspection of the data showed that there was a difference in attendance of handicapped pupils who were members of classes for less than 180 days and those who were 180 day class members. No reason for this difference was revealed by the data. The data on excuses presented as a reason for absence showed more absences due to doctors excuses and illness for handicapped pupils. In depth research on the causes of absence of handicapped pupils was recommended.

In many manufacturing companies, large databases containing data on failures and repairs of products are maintained. This paper reports on a case where information from such a database is extracted. Such information extracted could be useful for identifying opportunities for reliability improvements in the products. The database was obtained from a manufacturer of inkjet printers and contains both fixed-format and free-form text fields. At present, techniques developed in data mining and information retrieval are mainly designed to handle either fixed-format or free-form text fields, but not a combination of both. The approach taken in this paper is to first transform the free-form text fields into a number of fixed-format fields through analysis of the frequency of key words. Association analysis was then carried out on the resulting fixed-format fields. Results obtained from the analysis produced a number of associations that could contribute to improving product reliability. / Singapore-MIT Alliance (SMA)

The technology exists for the migration of healthcare data from its archaic paper-based system to an electronic one and once in digital form, to be transported anywhere in the world in a matter of seconds. The advent of universally accessible healthcare data benefits all participants, but one of the outstanding problems that must be addressed is how to uniquely identify and link a patient to his or her specific medical data. To date, a few solutions to this problem have been proposed that are limited in their effectiveness. We propose the use of biometric technology within our FIRD framework in solving the unique association of a patient to his or her medical data distinctively. This would allow a patient to have real time access to all of his or her recorded healthcare information electronically whenever it is necessary, securely with minimal effort, greater effectiveness, and ease.

BAKGRUND: Omvårdnadsdokumentationen har varit lagstadgad sedan 1986. Tidigare studier visar på brister i omvårdnadsdokumentationens omfattning och att omvårdnadsprocessen inte följs. VIPS-modellen används i stor utsträckning i Sverige för att dokumentera omvårdnaden. VIPS står för Välbefinnande, Integritet, Prevention och Säkerhet. SYFTE: Syftet med denna litteraturöversikt var att få en överblick över vad och i vilken utsträckning svenska sjuksköterskor dokumenterar i omvårdnadsjournalen. METOD: En litteraturöversikt har gjorts med åtta vetenskapliga artiklar. RESULTAT: Resultatet visar att sjuksköterskor i Sverige främst dokumenterar status och åtgärder. Diagnoser, mål, resultat och epikriser förekommer betydligt mer sporadiskt. Omfattningen av dokumentationen är undermålig och fullständig dokumentation enligt omvårdnadsprocessen förekommer sällan. DISKUSSION: Sjuksköterskor behöver kontinuerlig utbildning för att förstå vikten av en väldokumenterad patientjournal som följer omvårdnadsprocessen. Nya system som NANDA och NIC skulle i framtiden kunna underlätta dokumentationen genom att ett standardiserat språk tillämpas. / BACKGROUND: Nursing documentation has been a legal obligation in Sweden since 1986. Many earlier studies show that the documentation lack comprehensiveness and that the nursing process is not followed. In Sweden many nurses uses the VIPS-model when documenting. VIPS is acronym for the Swedish spelling words Well-being, Integrity, Prevention and Security. PURPOSE: The purpose of this study was to examine what and to what extent nurses in Sweden document in the patient-journal. METHOD: A literature review was chosen for this study. RESULT: The result shows that nurses in Sweden document nursing status and interventions the most. There is less documentation about diagnosis, goals, outcome and discharge notes. The comprehensiveness of the patient records is poor and complete documentation occurs rarely. DISCUSSION: Nurses need education to understand the importance of having a clear structure in the patient record following the nursing process. In the future a standardized language can help the nurses to document according to the nursing process by using systems as NANDA and NIC.

Abbreviations are common in clinical documentation, as this type of text is written under time-pressure and serves mostly for internal communication. This study attempts to apply and extend existing rule-based algorithms that have been developed for English and Swedish abbreviation detection, in order to create an abbreviation detection algorithm for Swedish clinical texts that can identify and suggest definitions for abbreviations and acronyms. This can be used as a pre-processing step for further information extraction and text mining models, as well as for readability solutions. Through a literature review, a number of heuristics were defined for automatic abbreviation detection. These were used in the construction of the Swedish Clinical Abbreviation Normalizer (SCAN). The heuristics were: a) freely available external resources: a dictionary of general Swedish, a dictionary of medical terms and a dictionary of known Swedish medical abbreviations, b) maximum word lengths (from three to eight characters), and c) heuristics for handling common patterns such as hyphenation. For each token in the text, the algorithm checks whether it is a known word in one of the lexicons, and whether it fulfills the criteria for word length and the created heuristics. The final algorithm was evaluated on a set of 300 Swedish clinical notes from an emergency department at the Karolinska University Hospital, Stockholm. These notes were annotated for abbreviations, a total of 2,050 tokens. This set was annotated by a physician accustomed to reading and writing medical records. The algorithm was tested in different variants, where the word lists were modified, heuristics adapted to characteristics found in the texts, and different combinations of word lengths. The best performing version of the algorithm achieved an F-Measure score of 79%, with 76% recall and 81% precision, which is a considerable improvement over the baseline where each token was only matched against the word lists (51% F-measure, 87% recall, 36% precision). Not surprisingly, precision results are higher when the maximum word length is set to the lowest (three), and recall results higher when it is set to the highest (eight). Algorithms for rule-based systems, mainly developed for English, can be successfully adapted for abbreviation detection in Swedish medical records. System performance relies heavily on the quality of the external resources, as well as on the created heuristics. In order to improve results, part-of-speech information and/or local context is needed for disambiguation. In the case of Swedish, compounding also needs to be handled.

Although end-user support is an important aspect of EMR implementation, it is not known in what ways it affects EMR success. To investigate this topic, a case study of end-user support for an open-source EMR was conducted in an Ontario Family Health Organization using 7 semistructured interviews based on the DeLone and McLean Model of Information System Success. Second, documentation for an open-source and proprietary EMR was analyzed using Carroll’s Minimalism as a theoretical framework. Finally, themes from this thesis were compared and contrasted with a multiple case study that examined support for a commercial EMR in 4 Ontario family health teams. Main findings include the role of informal support, which was important for ensuring that data are documented consistently, which in turn enabled information retrieval for providing better preventive care services. Also, formal support was important for mitigating problems of system quality, which had potential implications for patient safety.

Although end-user support is an important aspect of EMR implementation, it is not known in what ways it affects EMR success. To investigate this topic, a case study of end-user support for an open-source EMR was conducted in an Ontario Family Health Organization using 7 semistructured interviews based on the DeLone and McLean Model of Information System Success. Second, documentation for an open-source and proprietary EMR was analyzed using Carroll’s Minimalism as a theoretical framework. Finally, themes from this thesis were compared and contrasted with a multiple case study that examined support for a commercial EMR in 4 Ontario family health teams. Main findings include the role of informal support, which was important for ensuring that data are documented consistently, which in turn enabled information retrieval for providing better preventive care services. Also, formal support was important for mitigating problems of system quality, which had potential implications for patient safety.

In this Bachelor's thesis the result from a Delphi study regarding FRBR, performed by Yin Zhang and Athena Salaba in 2007 and published in 2009 – What is next for Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records? A Delphi study – is analyzed by qualitatively interviewing professionals active within the library and information science field in Sweden. The results are compared and possible deviations and adjustments are illuminated and discussed. The purpose of the thesis is to determine the topicality of the Delphi study in 2011 from a Swedish perspective. Conclusions made from the thesis shows that the main areas are still the same, but adjustments regarding the relative order of issues might be needed; primarily a shift of focus from theoretical to practical issues. More specifically, a focus on user aspects, user studies and authority work is needed.

A combination of some well known nonparametric tests to detect trend in location is considered. Simulation results show that the power of this combination is remarkably increased. (author's abstract) / Series: Forschungsberichte / Institut für Statistik

This thesis explores why the Public Archives of Canada, which was established in 1872, did not have the full authority or capability to collect the government records of Canada until 1966. The Archives started as an institution focused on collecting historical records, and for decades was largely indifferent to protecting government records. Royal Commissions, particularly those that reported in 1914 and 1962 played a central role in identifying the problems of records management within the growing Canadian civil service. Changing notions of archival theory were also important, as was the influence of professional academics, particularly those historians mandated to write official wartime histories of various federal departments. This thesis argues that the Second World War and the Cold War finally motivated politicians and bureaucrats to address records concerns that senior government officials had first identified during the time of Sir Wilfrid Laurier.