For portals, speak patients' language ( c/o Healthcare IT News )

Mike Miliard's 

For portals, speak patients' language 

in Healthcare IT News is a reminder of accessibility and engagement at the level of a communities languages.

This is one of the reasons why I am committed to using Drupal, to try to make use of its Internationalization capabilities amongst others. 

Thanks to Mike's post I'm now familiar with a 'full court press' as a hospital - enterprise wide no less - seeks to achieve defined patient engagement levels by accessing their electronic health record.

This begs the question of what constitutes the patients' language? I don't just mean the purely linguistic forms of Chinese, Korean, Russian and Greek mentioned in the article. The effort is driven by the statutory demands of meaningful use, but what of the patient's general literacy, IT and health literacies? How do patients make sense of their own health (or another in the role of a carer) not just in a given language, but culturally from a medical sociological and public health perspective? What is the community's vocabulary when it comes to health?

How can we assure that meaningfulness? How can we affirm that use and critically translate use into patient benefits and self-efficacy?

You could also entitle Mike's article as

4 portals speak patients' language

individual

INTERPERSONAL : SCIENCES

humanistic ------------------------------------------- mechanistic

SOCIOLOGY : POLITICAL

group

Health Literacy, Accessibility	Measures (health literacy, patient engagement, health and well-being, clinical outcomes)
Cultural Diversity, Languages, Carer	Internationalization 'Meaningful Use', Standards, Legislation, Policy

When we focus on languages we must remember that listening is a great gift. Whether as health and IT professionals, educators, patients and carers, listening to the care domains can help us integrate diverse social, clinical, policy and technical objectives.

What do these portals say to you?

Mike Miliard twitter

Nursing Informatics 2014 - Call for Submissions

Please forward this message via to your own networks and contacts.

We are pleased to announce that NI 2014, the 12th International Congress on Nursing Informatics, will be held in Taipei, Taiwan, June 21-25, 2014.

The theme of the conference is “eSmart + ” where “e” stands for eHealth, “S” implies simplicity, “m” represents mobility and meaningful use, “a” denotes advanced leadership, “r” indicates revolution, “t” means translational technologies, and “+” symbolizes People Leading uCare Safely. The acronym is also used to convey the idea of adopting smart technology to help health providers deliver higher quality care.

The online submissions system is now open and will remain open until mid-September 2013. Decisions on manuscripts will be made by mid-December 2013.

You can find more information at the conference website: www.ni2014.org

We very much look forward to seeing your submissions and to meeting you in Taiwan next year.

With best wishes

Nick Hardiker & Heimar Marin

Co-Chairs, Scientific Programme Committee, NI2014

Job Position: one Research Assistant in Semantic Web and Healthcare areas

This presents a great opportunity:

The Unit for Health Care and Life Sciences (HCLS) at the Digital Enterprise Research Institute (DERI: http://www.deri.ie/) of the National University of Ireland, Galway invites applications for a Research Assistant (RA) position.

 

Research Assistant (RA) Position: Semantic Web in HealthCare and Life Sciences

DERI – National University of Ireland, Galway

 

DERI is a leading research institute in semantic technologies that offers a stimulating, dynamic and multi-cultural research environment, excellent ties to research-groups worldwide, close collaboration with industrial partners and up-to-date infrastructure and resources.

 

The DERI HCLS group (http://hcls.deri.ie/) has a focus on applied research in the use of semantics in solving some key healthcare problems and dealing with: 

• Interoperability of Electronic Healthcare Records (EHRs).
• Interoperability of distributed healthcare policies.
• Infrastructure which will scale to the thousands, and, in some environments millions, of patients who will avail of telehealth in the future.
• Secure infrastructure which accounts for the ownership of patient data, the privacy and dignity of the patient, and which allows the patient play a part in managing his/her chronic illness.

This will involve research into HCLS ontologies and standards (e.g., HL7, openEHR) within the area of healthcare messaging, patient modelling and distributed personal health records. Research in the DERI HCLS research group is carried out in close collaboration with other collaborating institutions and industrial partners. Candidates should have:

 

• A graduate degree in Computer Science/ Software Engineering or related fields.
• Knowledge of Semantic Web Technologies (RDF, SPARQL, OWL).
• Knowledge of healthcare standards (e.g., HL7, openEHR) is a plus but not a mandatory requirement.

Successful candidates are expected to have the willingness to combine formal scientific work with hands-on evaluation with healthcare providers.

 

Please send your application (CV, two letters of reference) in PDF format to the email address below – by Friday, February 3^rd, 2012

 

Ronan Fox/Ratnesh Sahay

Domain for Health Care and Life Sciences

DERI - National University of Ireland, Galway

IDA Business Park,

Lower Dangan,

Galway, Ireland

 

E-mails: ronan dot fox at deri dot org, ratnesh dot sahay at deri dot org

For more information about Galway, NUIG, and DERI, visit the following websites:

www.deri.ie, www.nuigalway.ie, and http://www.galway-ieland.ie/. 

My source: Post by Ratnesh Sahay to several lists.