Thesis (M.S.)--Boston University

Thesis (M.S.)--Boston University / The innovation of a day hospital for the long term mentally ill patient brings to light new areas of possible exploration. This study sought to look at what perceptions six patients and a member of the patients' families had concerning day hospitalization and its effects. The patients, all long term mentally ill females, had been actively participating in a specific day hospital program of a large Boston area state hospital. The patients between the ages of thirty and forty-six years of age had been in the hospital for approximately five and one-half months. Previously, they had been hospitalized from nine months to twenty-seven years with a mean of eighteen years and one month [TRUNCATED]

Background: Hospitalizations including the diagnosis of an eating disorder (ED) have increased significantly in the pediatric population over the past few decades. Patients who are male, who areage, who receive an nasogastric (NG) tube, or who require admission to a residential treatment program often remain in the hospital for longer periods of time. Few studies examining LOS exist for children and adolescents with an ED. Longer lengths of stay have previously been associated with factors such as having Medicaid, a reduced body mass index (BMI) upon admission, and a diagnosis of anorexia nervosa (AN). Objective: The purpose of this study is to examine risk factors related to a longer LOS in children and adolescents admitted to a large urban pediatric hospital with AN or bulimia nervosa (BN). Participants/setting: A retrospective cohort study was conducted in 65 patients 9-20 years of age who were admitted to Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta (CHOA) between January 1, 2014 and December 31, 2015. Statistical Analysis: Frequency statistics were used to describe the demographic, anthropometric, and clinical characteristics of the population. A Mann Whitney U test or Kruskal-Walllis test was used to examine differences in LOS by demographic characteristics, mode of nutrition therapy, discharge treatment program location, and admission BMI category. The association between LOS category by demographic and clinical characteristics was determined using a Chi-square statistic. Results: A total of 65 patients (94% female, 89% Caucasian) with a mean age of 14.6 ± 2.4 years were admitted during the study period. The median LOS was 9 days (IQR; 6, 13) and was significantly longer in those who had an NG tube placed vs. oral diet (11 days (IQR; 7, 21) vs. 8 days (IQR; 5, 9.3), respectively; p Conclusion: The characteristics of hospitalized pediatric patients with an ED were consistent with those of other studies. Longer lengths of stay in those who had an NG tube placed may have been due to the patient’s lack of compliance, failure to gain weight, and severity of malnutrition since more time is needed for medical recovery. More treatment centers for children and adolescents with an ED are needed in the state of Georgia to potentially reduce LOS. Future studies should include a greater percentage of males and larger population of children and adolescents.

INTRODUCTION: Asthma, the leading chronic disease in children, is a major public health issue with 6.2 million children below 18 years currently diagnosed with asthma in the United States. This study sought to examine the national estimates and predictors of the burden of childhood asthma-hospitalizations in children below 18 years. METHODS: Data from the 2012 Kids’ Inpatient Database was used for analysis. Principal asthma diagnoses were identified using the International Classification of Diseases, Ninth Revision, Clinical Modification code 493. xx. The burden was assessed in terms of number of asthma-related hospitalizations, total numbers of days spent in the hospital and total costs. Multivariate regression analysis was conducted to examine the predictors of childhood asthma hospitalizations. RESULTS: There were an estimated 82,634 asthma-related hospitalizations among children below 18 years in the United States in 2012, accounting for about 1 billion US dollars in hospital charges and more than 150,000 hospital days. Government payers (Medicare and Medicaid) were billed for about 60% of asthma-related hospitalizations in children. The rate of asthma hospitalizations was lowest in the Midwest (19.23%) and males accounted for more than half (62.57%) of asthma cases in children in the United States. The mean of hospital charges per discharge was 12,900 US dollars and the mean length of stay was 1.96 days. Older age (ages 12-17), Government insurance status, being female, living in the Western region and longer length of stay predicted higher total charges for childhood asthma-related hospitalizations. Factors associated with longer length of stay included older age (ages 12-17), private insurance status, being female and living in the Southern region of the country. CONCLUSION: The study findings suggest that childhood asthma remains a healthcare burden therefore, there is need for improvements in medications and outpatient treatments of asthma to reduce childhood asthma-hospitalizations in the United States. Keywords: children, asthma, hospitalizations, burden

The U.S. health care system is considered costly and highly inefficient, devoting substantial resources to the treatment of acute conditions in a hospital setting rather than focusing on prevention and keeping patients out of the hospital. The potential for cost savings is large; in the U.S. more than $30 billion are spent each year on hospitalizations deemed preventable, 31% of which is attributed to heart diseases and 20% to diabetes. Motivated by this, our work focuses on developing centralized and distributed learning methods to predict future heart- or diabetes- related hospitalizations based on patient Electronic Health Records (EHRs). We explore a variety of supervised classification methods and we present a novel likelihood ratio based method (K-LRT) that predicts hospitalizations and offers interpretability by identifying the K most significant features that lead to a positive prediction for each patient. Next, assuming that the positive class consists of multiple clusters (hospitalized patients due to different reasons), while the negative class is drawn from a single cluster (non-hospitalized patients healthy in every aspect), we present an alternating optimization approach, which jointly discovers the clusters in the positive class and optimizes the classifiers that separate each positive cluster from the negative samples. We establish the convergence of the method and characterize its VC dimension. Last, we develop a decentralized cluster Primal-Dual Splitting (cPDS) method for large-scale problems, that is computationally efficient and privacy-aware. Such a distributed learning scheme is relevant for multi-institutional collaborations or peer-to-peer applications, allowing the agents to collaborate, while keeping every participant's data private. cPDS is proved to have an improved convergence rate compared to existing centralized and decentralized methods. We test all methods on real EHR data from the Boston Medical Center and compare results in terms of prediction accuracy and interpretability.

The overall aim of the present thesis was to study factors related to transfers of older people between nursing homes, emergency department and hospital care. The thesis was based on four studies and used three methods: focus group discussions, structured review of electronic healthcare records, semi-structured interviews with registered nurses and general practitioners. Study I: nursing home nurses found it difficult to decide whether older residents should be referred to hospital from the nursing home. Hospital registered nurses reported often trying to stop premature discharges or having to carry out the discharge although it had not been fully prepared. Study II: transfer rate to ED was 594 over 9 months among a total of 431 residents (M 1.37 each). 25% were caused by falls and/or injuries, 63% resulted in hospitalization (M 7.12 days). The transfer rate was 0.00-1.03 transfers/bed; it was higher for private for-profit providers than for public/private non-profit providers. Study III: nursing homes with high transfer rates had fewer updated advance care plans than did nursing homes with lower transfer rates. More nurses from nursing homes with low transfer rates had a specialist education and training in dementia care and had worked longer in eldercare. Study IV: general practitioners perceived registered nurses’ continuity, competence and collaboration with family members as important to quality of care in nursing homes; inadequate staffing, lack of medical equipment and less-than-optimal IT systems for electronic healthcare records are impediments to patient safety. The findings indicate that organizational factors could explain differences in transfer rates between nursing homes. The studies highlight the importance of advance care planning together with residents and family members in facilitating future medical decisions. Registered nurses’ continuity and competence are perceived as crucial to quality of care. To meet increasing demands for more complex medical treatment at nursing homes and to provide high-quality palliative care several changes should be made: Nursing homes should be equipped with suitable medical equipment and registered nurse staff should be matched accordingly; importantly, registered nurses and general practitioners should be able to access each other’s healthcare record systems.

Introdução: os acidentes e violências, considerados como problema de saúde pública (OMS, 2002), muitas vezes têm desfecho final com episódio de morte e, em outras, na assistência hospitalar. A magnitude dessas causas externas e a morbimortalidade mostram representatividade importante para a epidemiologia dos agravos e doenças. Em decorrência disso, torna-se necessário conhecer a qualidade dos registros hospitalares, a fim de auxiliar a produção de conhecimentos epidemiológicos sobre as causas externas. Objetivos: avaliar a qualidade dos códigos diagnósticos com dados registrados no Sistema de Informações Hospitalares (SIH) e do Centro de Processamento de Dados Hospitalares (CPDH) comparados ao prontuário médico correspondente, em uma amostra de internações por causas externas em três hospitais selecionados. Descrever o perfil de morbimortalidade nas hospitalizações por causas externas na região de Ribeirão Preto, SP, em 2005, e identificar a subnotificação das causas externas em relação à natureza da lesão nas internações. Metodologia: estudo descritivo e transversal, com abordagem quantitativa que se baseia em dados secundários de hospitalizações por causas externas, em 2005. A população selecionada é de pacientes residentes e atendidos na região de Ribeirão Preto, em 2005, com diagnóstico principal referente ao capítulo XIX da CID-10. Estudo realizado em duas partes: na primeira, estuda-se o perfil das hospitalizações por causas externas e as subnotificações dos registros das causas externas nos sistemas; na segunda parte foi selecionada da amostra aleatória de hospitalizações notificadas no sistema CPDH e prontuários. Para validação, utilizou-se como critério padrão-ouro os dados dos prontuários. Na análise dos dados foi aplicado teste de sensibilidade para validação dos dados, com recursos dos aplicativos Epiinfo, Epidat e Excel. Resultados: o perfil epidemiológico das hospitalizações, devido às causas externas, acomete mais a população de adultos jovens e do sexo masculino, em cerca de 70% dos pacientes. As quedas, primeira na lista das causas externas com 49%, destacando-se a taxa de internação para os pacientes idosos, com 70 anos e mais, foi superior a 60 por 10 mil habitantes. Os acidentes de transporte terrestre ocuparam o segundo lugar com 15%, sendo que, desses, a maioria era de motociclistas (36%). As variáveis de identificação do paciente (idade, sexo, procedência, tipo de convênio) em geral, tiveram ótima sensibilidade (95-99%) em ambos os sistemas, a sensibilidade para a natureza da lesão, registrada no CPDH, foi de 72,8% e SIH 60,6%. O sub-registro do tipo de causa externa nos prontuários, para o hospital com atendimento SUS foi de 0,05 (1 em 196); hospital misto, 17,9 (33 em 184) e hospital privado 69,1 (95 em142), respectivamente a sensibilidade dos dados eletrônicos CPDH em relação aos prontuários médico de pacientes para código diagnóstico principal com três caracteres (77,4 - 69,6 e 71,1). Quanto à sensibilidade no SIH para código diagnóstico principal três caracteres, o hospital SUS ficou com 68,8% e hospital misto com 50,3%. Outro achado foi o desdobramento com novas autorizações de internações hospitalares (AIHs) para a mesma internação, superestimando as causas externas em 8%, destacam-se entre essas causas as internações decorrentes de acidentes com motociclistas, complicações de assistência médica/cirúrgica e as queimaduras. Conclusão: conclui-se que as causas externas nas hospitalizações, têm sua porta principal de entrada por meio dos hospitais públicos. As quedas têm as taxas de hospitalizações mais elevadas entre as causas externas, porém alteram-se com o viés de interpretação dos codificadores das AIHs. É preciso investir: padronização de conceitos sobre os eventos ocorridos, esforços dos codificadores para identificar códigos específicos e a sensibilização dos profissionais médicos quanto à importância do preenchimento correto e completo da informação. Portanto, mesmo com as limitações dos sistemas de informações, esses não são fatores impeditivos para utilização como ferramentas para os gestores nas ações de planejamento, administração e para pesquisadores, contribuindo para a melhoria da saúde pública. / Introduction: the final outcome of accidents and violence, considered to be public health problems (WHO, 2002), often is death or hospital care. The magnitude of morbidity and mortality due to these external causes shows their importance for the epidemiology of accidents and diseases. On this basis, it is necessary to determine the quality of hospital records in order to aid the production of epidemiological information about external causes. Objectives: to assess the quality and to validate the diagnostic codes by means of data recorded in the Hospital Information System (SIH) and in the Center of Hospital Data Processing (CPDH) compared to the corresponding medical records in a sample of admissions due to external causes in the Ribeirão Preto region, SP, in 2005, and to identify the under-notification of external causes regarding the nature of the injuries of admitted individuals. Methodology: this was a descriptive cross-sectional study with a quantitative approach based on secondary hospitalization data due to external causes, in 2005. The selected population consisted of patients residing and attended in the Ribeirão Preto region in 2005, with a main diagnosis referring to chapter XIX of the CID-10. The study was conducted in two stages: the first involved the study of the profile of hospitalizations due to external causes and the under-notifications of the records of external causes in the systems; the second involved the selection of a random sample of hospitalizations notified to the CPDH system and recorded in the medical records. The gold standard criterion for validation was the information in the medical records. In the analysis of data, the sensitivity test was applied for data validation using the Epi Info, Epidat and Excel software. Results: the epidemiological profile of hospitalizations due to external causes consisted mainly of the population of young adult males, corresponding to about 70% of the patients. Falls, first in the list of external causes with 49%, with emphasis on the rate of hospitalization of elderly patients aged 70 years or older, involved more than 60 per 10 thousand inhabitants. The land transport accidents occupied second place with 15%, most of them involving motorcyclists (36%). In general, the variables of patient identification (age, sex, origin, type of health contract) showed excellent sensitivity (95-99%) in both systems. The sensitivity of the nature of injury recorded was 72.8 for the CPDH and 60.6% for the SIH. The under-recording of the type of external cause in the medical records was 0.05 (1 in 196) for the SUS hospital, 17.9 (33 in 184) for the mixed hospital, and 69.1 for the private hospital (95 in142). The sensitivity of the electronic CPDH data regarding the handbooks medical of patients for the major diagnostic code of 3 characters was 77.4, 69.6 and 71.1, respectively. Regarding the sensitivity in the SIH for the 3 character major diagnosis, the SUS hospital had a value of 68.8% and the mixed hospital a value of 50.3%. Another finding was the duplication with new authorizations of hospital internments (AIHs) for the same admission, overestimating the external causes by 8%. Particularly important among them were the causes of admission due to motorcycle accidents, complication of medical/surgical care, and burns. Conclusion: we conclude that the major point of entry of external causes for hospitalization is through public hospitals. Falls involve the highest rates of hospitalization among external causes, but they are altered by the bias of interpretation on the part of the AIHs coders. It is necessary to invest in the standardization of concepts about the events that occur, in the efforts of coders for the identification of specific codes, and in the sensitization of medical professionals to the importance of a correct and complete filling of information. However, despite the limitations of the information systems, these are not factors that prevent their use as tools for managers in planning and administration actions and for researchers, contributing to the improvement of public health.

Introdução: os acidentes e violências, considerados como problema de saúde pública (OMS, 2002), muitas vezes têm desfecho final com episódio de morte e, em outras, na assistência hospitalar. A magnitude dessas causas externas e a morbimortalidade mostram representatividade importante para a epidemiologia dos agravos e doenças. Em decorrência disso, torna-se necessário conhecer a qualidade dos registros hospitalares, a fim de auxiliar a produção de conhecimentos epidemiológicos sobre as causas externas. Objetivos: avaliar a qualidade dos códigos diagnósticos com dados registrados no Sistema de Informações Hospitalares (SIH) e do Centro de Processamento de Dados Hospitalares (CPDH) comparados ao prontuário médico correspondente, em uma amostra de internações por causas externas em três hospitais selecionados. Descrever o perfil de morbimortalidade nas hospitalizações por causas externas na região de Ribeirão Preto, SP, em 2005, e identificar a subnotificação das causas externas em relação à natureza da lesão nas internações. Metodologia: estudo descritivo e transversal, com abordagem quantitativa que se baseia em dados secundários de hospitalizações por causas externas, em 2005. A população selecionada é de pacientes residentes e atendidos na região de Ribeirão Preto, em 2005, com diagnóstico principal referente ao capítulo XIX da CID-10. Estudo realizado em duas partes: na primeira, estuda-se o perfil das hospitalizações por causas externas e as subnotificações dos registros das causas externas nos sistemas; na segunda parte foi selecionada da amostra aleatória de hospitalizações notificadas no sistema CPDH e prontuários. Para validação, utilizou-se como critério padrão-ouro os dados dos prontuários. Na análise dos dados foi aplicado teste de sensibilidade para validação dos dados, com recursos dos aplicativos Epiinfo, Epidat e Excel. Resultados: o perfil epidemiológico das hospitalizações, devido às causas externas, acomete mais a população de adultos jovens e do sexo masculino, em cerca de 70% dos pacientes. As quedas, primeira na lista das causas externas com 49%, destacando-se a taxa de internação para os pacientes idosos, com 70 anos e mais, foi superior a 60 por 10 mil habitantes. Os acidentes de transporte terrestre ocuparam o segundo lugar com 15%, sendo que, desses, a maioria era de motociclistas (36%). As variáveis de identificação do paciente (idade, sexo, procedência, tipo de convênio) em geral, tiveram ótima sensibilidade (95-99%) em ambos os sistemas, a sensibilidade para a natureza da lesão, registrada no CPDH, foi de 72,8% e SIH 60,6%. O sub-registro do tipo de causa externa nos prontuários, para o hospital com atendimento SUS foi de 0,05 (1 em 196); hospital misto, 17,9 (33 em 184) e hospital privado 69,1 (95 em142), respectivamente a sensibilidade dos dados eletrônicos CPDH em relação aos prontuários médico de pacientes para código diagnóstico principal com três caracteres (77,4 - 69,6 e 71,1). Quanto à sensibilidade no SIH para código diagnóstico principal três caracteres, o hospital SUS ficou com 68,8% e hospital misto com 50,3%. Outro achado foi o desdobramento com novas autorizações de internações hospitalares (AIHs) para a mesma internação, superestimando as causas externas em 8%, destacam-se entre essas causas as internações decorrentes de acidentes com motociclistas, complicações de assistência médica/cirúrgica e as queimaduras. Conclusão: conclui-se que as causas externas nas hospitalizações, têm sua porta principal de entrada por meio dos hospitais públicos. As quedas têm as taxas de hospitalizações mais elevadas entre as causas externas, porém alteram-se com o viés de interpretação dos codificadores das AIHs. É preciso investir: padronização de conceitos sobre os eventos ocorridos, esforços dos codificadores para identificar códigos específicos e a sensibilização dos profissionais médicos quanto à importância do preenchimento correto e completo da informação. Portanto, mesmo com as limitações dos sistemas de informações, esses não são fatores impeditivos para utilização como ferramentas para os gestores nas ações de planejamento, administração e para pesquisadores, contribuindo para a melhoria da saúde pública. / Introduction: the final outcome of accidents and violence, considered to be public health problems (WHO, 2002), often is death or hospital care. The magnitude of morbidity and mortality due to these external causes shows their importance for the epidemiology of accidents and diseases. On this basis, it is necessary to determine the quality of hospital records in order to aid the production of epidemiological information about external causes. Objectives: to assess the quality and to validate the diagnostic codes by means of data recorded in the Hospital Information System (SIH) and in the Center of Hospital Data Processing (CPDH) compared to the corresponding medical records in a sample of admissions due to external causes in the Ribeirão Preto region, SP, in 2005, and to identify the under-notification of external causes regarding the nature of the injuries of admitted individuals. Methodology: this was a descriptive cross-sectional study with a quantitative approach based on secondary hospitalization data due to external causes, in 2005. The selected population consisted of patients residing and attended in the Ribeirão Preto region in 2005, with a main diagnosis referring to chapter XIX of the CID-10. The study was conducted in two stages: the first involved the study of the profile of hospitalizations due to external causes and the under-notifications of the records of external causes in the systems; the second involved the selection of a random sample of hospitalizations notified to the CPDH system and recorded in the medical records. The gold standard criterion for validation was the information in the medical records. In the analysis of data, the sensitivity test was applied for data validation using the Epi Info, Epidat and Excel software. Results: the epidemiological profile of hospitalizations due to external causes consisted mainly of the population of young adult males, corresponding to about 70% of the patients. Falls, first in the list of external causes with 49%, with emphasis on the rate of hospitalization of elderly patients aged 70 years or older, involved more than 60 per 10 thousand inhabitants. The land transport accidents occupied second place with 15%, most of them involving motorcyclists (36%). In general, the variables of patient identification (age, sex, origin, type of health contract) showed excellent sensitivity (95-99%) in both systems. The sensitivity of the nature of injury recorded was 72.8 for the CPDH and 60.6% for the SIH. The under-recording of the type of external cause in the medical records was 0.05 (1 in 196) for the SUS hospital, 17.9 (33 in 184) for the mixed hospital, and 69.1 for the private hospital (95 in142). The sensitivity of the electronic CPDH data regarding the handbooks medical of patients for the major diagnostic code of 3 characters was 77.4, 69.6 and 71.1, respectively. Regarding the sensitivity in the SIH for the 3 character major diagnosis, the SUS hospital had a value of 68.8% and the mixed hospital a value of 50.3%. Another finding was the duplication with new authorizations of hospital internments (AIHs) for the same admission, overestimating the external causes by 8%. Particularly important among them were the causes of admission due to motorcycle accidents, complication of medical/surgical care, and burns. Conclusion: we conclude that the major point of entry of external causes for hospitalization is through public hospitals. Falls involve the highest rates of hospitalization among external causes, but they are altered by the bias of interpretation on the part of the AIHs coders. It is necessary to invest in the standardization of concepts about the events that occur, in the efforts of coders for the identification of specific codes, and in the sensitization of medical professionals to the importance of a correct and complete filling of information. However, despite the limitations of the information systems, these are not factors that prevent their use as tools for managers in planning and administration actions and for researchers, contributing to the improvement of public health.

Influenza causes thousands of illnesses and deaths annually in the United States. In part, this is a product of rapid changes in influenza genetics, resulting in different variants than a previous season. Influenza virus traverses landscapes by infecting susceptible hosts, thus allowing seasonal influenza to move great distances due to the mobility of humans who occupy diverse natural, social, and built environments. Using H3N2 influenza viral sequences from Minnesota in the 2012-2013 influenza season we explored relationships between the diversity of influenza genetics and the environments in which humans live. Landscape genetic methods were used to test for relationships between genetic diversity of influenza viruses with different concepts of distance separating the viruses in time and space. Additional analyses were used to identify relationships between influenza genetic evolution and socio-environmental characteristics of Minnesota zip code tabulation areas (ZCTAs) where those viruses were isolated. Influenza hospitalization data in Minnesota ZCTAs was also analyzed with spatial and statistical methods to compare differences and similarities between environmental features driving influenza genetic evolution and influenza morbidity. Findings indicated a complex genetic landscape with few significant correlations between genetic distance and other distance concepts. Elderly populations and populations without health insurance were found to be drivers of H3 hospitalizations. The synthesis of information from theses analyses can be used to inform our overall understanding of influenza diffusion and will allow for more targeted and effective public health prevention strategies.

While there is a vast amount of research focusing on the importance of school connectedness for short-term outcomes related to alcohol use, few studies have looked at the longer-term consequences of poor school connectedness. The aim of the current study was therefore to investigate the gender-specific association between school connectedness (1966) and alcohol- related hospitalization in adulthood (1973-2007). Moreover, the role of adjustment problems in adolescence was examined. Logistic regression analysis was based on a cohort of Swedish children, born in 1953 in Stockholm, Sweden, including 6,269 males and 6,106 females. The results revealed a statistically significant relationship between having a lower level of school connectedness in childhood and an increased risk of hospitalization due to alcohol misuse in adulthood, among males. The findings for females were less conclusive. Controlling for socioeconomic background and adjustment problems in adolescence reduced the strength of the association but did not explain it. In sum, this study shows that school connectedness appear to have long-term consequences for alcohol-related diseases, but further research is needed to understand the mechanisms behind this finding.