Development of a Digital Platform: A Perspective to Advance Space Telepharmacy.

Goal: Lessons learned from decades of human spaceflight have helped advance the delivery of healthcare in rural and remote areas of the globe. Inclusion of the public in spaceflights is not yet accompanied by technology capable of monitoring their physical and mental health, managing clinical conditions, and rapidly identifying medical emergencies. Telepharmacy is a practice prioritizing pharmacotherapeutic guidance and monitoring to help improve patient quality of life, and can potentially expand the field of space medicine. We seek to advance pharmaceutical care through telepharmacy by developing a digital platform. Objective: This study focuses on the development of a digital platform for teleassistance and pharmaceutical teleconsulting services that builds on lessons learned in delivering space medicine. Methods: The platform contains evidence-based information on various drugs grouped by medical specialty, and also records and saves patient appointments. It has specific service protocols for service standardization, including artificial intelligence, to allow agility in services and escalation. All data is protected by privacy and professional ethics guidelines. Results: The telepharmacy platform is ready and currently undergoing testing for ground applications through validation studies in hospitals or medical clinics. Conclusions: Although developed for use on Earth, this telepharmacy platform provides a good example of how terrestrial healthcare knowledge and technology can be transferred to space missions.

Usability evaluation of circRNA identification tools: Development of a heuristic-based framework and analysis.

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVE: Circular RNAs (circRNAs) are endogenous molecules of non-coding RNA that form a covalently closed loop at the 3' and 5' ends. Recently, the role of these molecules in the regulation of gene expression and their involvement in several human pathologies has gained notoriety. The identification of circRNAs is highly dependent on computational methods for analyzing RNA sequencing data. However, bioinformatics software is known to be problematic in terms of usability. Evidence points out that tools for identifying circRNAs can have such problems, negatively impacting researchers in this field. Here we present a heuristic-based framework for evaluating the usability of command-line circRNA identification software. METHODS: We used heuristics evaluation to comprehensively identify the usability issues in a sample of circRNA identification tools. RESULTS: We identified 46 usability issues presented individually in four tools. Most of the issues had cosmetic or minor severity. These are unlikely to challenge experienced users but may cause inconvenience for novice users. We also identified severe issues with the potential to harm users regardless of their experience. The areas most affected were the documentation and the installability of the tools. CONCLUSIONS: With the proposed framework, we formally describe, for the first time, the usability problems that can affect users in this area of circRNA research. We hope that our framework can help researchers evaluate their software's usability during development.

Patient reported outcomes in the daily practice in clinical oncology: A systematic review.

The use of patient-reported outcomes brings direct benefits to the daily practice in Clinical Oncology, providing information that allows the monitoring of patients between consultations, with an increase in the bond with the medical team and the patient's satisfaction with their treatment. This review seeks to identify electronic systems for collecting patient data, highlighting the possible benefits that motivated the use of these systems and identifying the population, instruments, way of handling alerts and possible limitations and barriers to implementation in clinical practice. Thus, 25 articles were selected and reviewed, following a previously established systematic literature review protocol. This review is useful for gathering information for the development of new patient-focused applications in Oncology.

Detect-S: an mHealth application to assist health professionals to identify suicide risk in hospitalized patients.

INTRODUCTION: Suicide is a serious public health problem that affects the whole world. This study describes development of the prototype for an mHealth application (app) intended to assist healthcare professionals to identify suicide risk in hospitalized patients and reports on testing of the app by some of these professionals, conducted to confirm its functionality. METHOD: This is applied exploratory research into use of Information Technology within the healthcare field, based on application prototyping for mobile devices. The research was conducted at the Universidade Federal de Ciências da Saúde de Porto Alegre (UFCSPA) from 2017 to 2019. Six healthcare professionals, one data scientist, and three undergraduate students in Biomedical Informatics took part in the study. All research participants signed the free and informed consent form. RESULTS: The main findings show that the development team created a prototype named Detect-S, which became a cross-platform application (iOS and Android) offering 16 functions. CONCLUSION: It can be concluded that Detect-S has the potential to be a positive technological instrument that can be tested in a hospital setting to assist healthcare professionals to identify and manage patients with at risk of suicide.

Detect-S: an mHealth application to assist health professionals to identify suicide risk in hospitalized patients

Abstract Introduction Suicide is a serious public health problem that affects the whole world. This study describes development of the prototype for an mHealth application (app) intended to assist healthcare professionals to identify suicide risk in hospitalized patients and reports on testing of the app by some of these professionals, conducted to confirm its functionality. Method This is applied exploratory research into use of Information Technology within the healthcare field, based on application prototyping for mobile devices. The research was conducted at the Universidade Federal de Ciências da Saúde de Porto Alegre (UFCSPA) from 2017 to 2019. Six healthcare professionals, one data scientist, and three undergraduate students in Biomedical Informatics took part in the study. All research participants signed the free and informed consent form. Results The main findings show that the development team created a prototype named Detect-S, which became a cross-platform application (iOS and Android) offering 16 functions. Conclusion It can be concluded that Detect-S has the potential to be a positive technological instrument that can be tested in a hospital setting to assist healthcare professionals to identify and manage patients with at risk of suicide.

Model for quality analysis of neonatal hearing screening software: theory applied.

BACKGROUND: It is necessary to ensure functional diagnosis and auditory rehabilitation as part of a continuous and inseparable follow-up process that begins with Neonatal Hearing Screening to achieve the expected outcome in children with hearing loss. Different software controls the data of this process, adopting different strategies and involving the technology for this. However, there is no specific model available in the literature for analyzing the quality of the software aimed at recording and monitoring data from Neonatal Hearing Screening. OBJECTIVE: To propose a specific model for the analysis of the quality of softwares used for monitoring Neonatal Hearing Screening data, based on the ISO/IEC 25,010/2011 standards. METHODS: This is an applied research, in which a model was proposed, applied and evaluated to analyze the quality of Neonatal Hearing Screening softwares, based on an exploratory documental analysis of softwares related to the Neonatal Hearing Screening record domain. The quality model was proposed based on the ISO/IEC 25,010/2011 standards, constituting a checklist for qualitative analysis. RESULTS: For the Neonatal Hearing Screening registration softwares quality evaluation model, general criteria were presented, classified into eight main categories: Functional Adequacy, Performance Efficiency, Compatibility, Usability, Reliability, Safety, Maintenance and Portability. Specific criteria were presented in question format. Finally, a checklist for quality control and decision making was proposed. This model was evaluated by specialists and was approved. CONCLUSION: The quality model presented in this article introduced important general and specific criteria to analyze softwares for Neonatal Hearing Screening. This model has been validated by specialists in informatics and audiology. Therefore, this model can be used comprehensively, as a standard assessment tool for Neonatal Hearing Screening softwares, allowing predicting improvements. It is suggested that the audiologists and informatics responsible for softwares of this nature, consider, in each country, the socioeconomic and health context to validate its applicability.