Centre for Health Informatics:
Improving Awareness of Information and Communications Technology in Healthcare
CD Review by Rod Ward

Installation

Required the latest version of Quick time for windows & plugin, but was quick and easy on my machine.

Part 1 of the programme starts with a  good quality video clip of a patient scenario (as shown in Figure 1). A gentleman who has experienced chest pain attending his GP, giving a medical and family history and then undergoing a physical examination. He is then referred to outpatients for a series of investigations and then on to a diabetes assessment clinic. The phone calls and bits of paper required for this patient experience are illustrated.

The next stage is of an emergency admission through ITU to eventual discharge.

A Path through this patients care is presented including diagrams showing progress interspersed with diagrams or graphs to illustrate progress (e.g. Figure 2). Unfortunately not all the sound files worked on the copy I received.
 
 

Figure 1 - video of patient scenario
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Figure 2 - graph of patient progress
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Part 2 of the programme considers "How IT will help" with videos and graphs of primary and secondary care examples.
NB Some of the "video clips" are animated diagrams also used in the IT-Eductra CD-ROM . Some examples were specific to ireland, but the principles can be extracted and are similar to UK systems.

Part 3 moves on to look at the Electronic Patient/Healthcare Record, The Internet, Training and Telemedicine, the final section is about relevant EU projects. Links to Internet sites are built in with short descriptions for projects and web sites, before following the link.

A nicely designed menu system as shown in figure 3 helps the user navigate around the material - it would have been useful if this had loaded when the disc is first used, instead of going straight into the video clip.

Figure 3 - program menu
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Generally

This is a nicely designed an delivered resource. Much of it could have been delivered on video, requiring less technology to use it, particularly if it is used in a linear fashion. The ability to use the menu to jump around and the Internet links are the benefit of this delivery platform.

This would form a useful resource for any school of Nursing to support the Informatics curriculum. It could also be useful for hospitals to make available to their staff as part of strategies to move towards more use of Information and Communications Technology in healthcare.

System Requirements

Windows 95/98
Pentium processor or faster recommended
16 Mb RAM
16 bit colour display
CD-ROM Drive

The CD was produced by the

Centre for Health Informatics, Trinity College Dublin.
Tel: +353 1 608 2181
Fax: +353 1 671 0619
EMail: chi@tcd.ie
Web: http://www.cs.tcd.ie/CHI


I can be contacted  Rod@RodSpace.co.uk

Page Created: 30.3.99

Last Updated: 3.9.03