Does the acceptance of hybrid learning affect learning approaches in France?

PURPOSE: Acceptance of a learning technology affects students' intention to use that technology, but the influence of the acceptance of a learning technology on learning approaches has not been investigated in the literature. A deep learning approach is important in the field of health, where links must be created between skills, knowledge, and habits. Our hypothesis was that acceptance of a hybrid learning model would affect students' way of learning. METHODS: We analysed these concepts, and their correlations, in the context of a flipped classroom method using a local learning management system. In a sample of all students within a single year of study in the midwifery program (n= 38), we used 3 validated scales to evaluate these concepts (the Study Process Questionnaire, My Intellectual Work Tools, and the Hybrid E-Learning Acceptance Model: Learner Perceptions). RESULTS: Our sample had a positive acceptance of the learning model, but a neutral intention to use it. Students reported that they were distractible during distance learning. They presented a better mean score for the deep approach than for the superficial approach (P< 0.001), which is consistent with their declared learning strategies (personal reorganization of information; search and use of examples). There was no correlation between poor acceptance of the learning model and inadequate learning approaches. The strategy of using deep learning techniques was moderately correlated with acceptance of the learning model (rs= 0.42, P= 0.03). CONCLUSION: Learning approaches were not affected by acceptance of a hybrid learning model, due to the flexibility of the tool. However, we identified problems in the students' time utilization, which explains their neutral intention to use the system.

Using visual analytics for presenting comparative information on new drugs.

OBJECTIVE: When a new drug is marketed, physicians must decide whether they will consider it for their future practice. However, information about new drugs can be biased or hard to find. In this work, our objective was to study whether visual analytics could be used for comparing drug properties such as contraindications and adverse effects, and whether this visual comparison can help physicians to forge their own well-founded opinions about a new drug. MATERIALS AND METHODS: First, an ontology for comparative drug information was designed, based on the expectations expressed during focus groups comprised of physicians. Second, a prototype of a visual drug comparator website was developed. It implements several visualization methods: rainbow boxes (a new technique for overlapping set visualization), dynamic tables, bar charts and icons. Third, the website was evaluated by 22 GPs for four new drugs. We recorded the general satisfaction, the physician's decision whether to consider the new drug for future prescription, both before and after consulting the website, and their arguments to justify their choice. RESULTS: The prototype website permits the visual comparison of up to 10 drugs, including efficacy, contraindications, interactions, adverse effects, prices, dosage regimens,…All physicians found that the website allowed them to forge a well-founded opinion on the four new drugs. The physicians changed their decision about using a new drug in their future practice in 29 cases (out of 88) after consulting the website. DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSION: Visual analytics is a promising approach for presenting drug information and for comparing drugs. The visual comparison of drug properties allows physicians to forge their opinions on drugs. Since drug properties are available in reference texts, reviewed by public health agencies, it could contribute to the independent of drug information.

Parallel Design of Browsing Scheme and Data Model for Multi-Level Hierarchical Application Devoted to Management of Patient with Infectious Disease in Primary Care.

Many decision systems are based on a hierarchical approach, enriching the known context used to finally choose the right potential action. Designing the scheme for browsing the clinical guidelines is a task devoted to expert in infectious diseases. Designing the data model is a task devoted to the expert in data modeling. As a consequence, browsing scheme and data model generally differ in terms of abstraction levels. While the browsing scheme proposes to navigate into depth, the data model stays flat. We propose here a novel method to design in parallel the browsing scheme and the data model so that both of them reflect the different abstraction levels in decision process.

Design of a Visual Interface for Comparing Antibiotics Using Rainbow Boxes.

Non-optimal prescriptions of antibiotics have a negative impact on patients and population. Clinical practice guidelines are not always followed by doctors because the rationale of the recommendations is not always clear and can be difficult to understand. In this paper, we propose a new approach consisting in presenting the properties of antibiotics for allowing doctors to compare them and choose the most appropriate one. For that, we used and extended rainbow boxes, a new technique for overlapping set visualization. We tested our approach on 11 clinical situations related to urinary infections, and assessed the simplicity, the interest and utility with 11 doctors. 10 of them found that this approach was interesting and useful in clinical practice. Further studies are needed to confirm this preliminary work.

Abstractive Summarization of Drug Dosage Regimens for Supporting Drug Comparison.

Complicated dosage regimens often reduce adherence to drug treatments. The ease-of-administration must thus be taken into account when prescribing. Given one drug, there exists often several dosage regimens. Hence, comparison to similar drugs is difficult. Simplifying and summarizing them appears to be a required task for supporting General Practitioners to find the drug with the simplest regimen for the patient. We propose a summarization in two steps: first prunes out all low-importance information, and second proceed to fusion of remaining information. Rules for pruning and fusion strategies were designed by an expert in drug models. Evaluation was conducted on a dataset of 169 drugs. The agreement rate was 27.2%. We demonstrate that applying rules leads to a result that is correct by a computational point of view, but the result is often meaningless for the GP. We conclude with recommendations for further work.

Design and evaluation of a software for the objective and easy-to-read presentation of new drug properties to physicians.

BACKGROUND: When new pharmaceutical products appear on the market, physicians need to know whether they are likely to be useful in their practices. Physicians currently obtain most of their information about the market release and properties of new drugs from pharmaceutical industry representatives. However, the official information contained in the summary of product characteristics (SPCs) and evaluation reports from health agencies, provide a more complete view of the potential value of new drugs, although they can be long and difficult to read. The main objective of this work was to design a prototype computer program to facilitate the objective appraisal of the potential value of a new pharmaceutical product by physicians. This prototype is based on the modeling of pharmaceutical innovations described in a previous paper. METHODS: The interface was designed to allow physicians to develop a rapid understanding of the value of a new drug for their practices. We selected five new pharmaceutical products, to illustrate the function of this prototype. We considered only the texts supplied by national or international drug agencies at the time of market release. The perceived usability of the prototype was evaluated qualitatively, except for the System Usability Scale (SUS) score evaluation, by 10 physicians differing in age and medical background. RESULTS: The display is based on the various axes of the conceptual model of pharmaceutical innovations. The user can select three levels of detail when consulting this information (highly synthetic, synthetic and detailed). Tables provide a comparison of the properties of the new pharmaceutical product with those of existing drugs, if available for the same indication, in terms of efficacy, safety and ease of use. The interface was highly appreciated by evaluators, who found it easy to understand and suggested no other additions of important, internationally valid information. The mean System Usability Scale score for the 10 physicians was 82, corresponding to a "good" user interface. CONCLUSIONS: This work led us to propose the selection, grouping, and mode of presentation for various types of knowledge on pharmaceutical innovations in a way that was appreciated by evaluators. It provides physicians with readily accessible objective information about new drugs.

PyMedTermino: an open-source generic API for advanced terminology services.

The integration of terminologies is still a challenging problem in medical informatics research and software applications, due to the high number of heterogeneous terminologies. In this paper, we present a generic API (Application Programming Interface) for a multi-terminology multilingual terminology service, and PyMedTermino, its open-source implementation in Python with 5 terminological resources (ICD10, SNOMED CT, MedDRA, CDF, VCM iconic language) and the UMLS compendium. This service has been designed for research and educational purpose. It offers various advanced functionalities rarely present in terminology services.

Improving access to clinical practice guidelines with an interactive graphical interface using an iconic language.

BACKGROUND: Clinical practice guidelines are useful for physicians, and guidelines are available on the Internet from various websites such as Vidal Recos. However, these guidelines are long and difficult to read, especially during consultation. Similar difficulties have been encountered with drug summaries of product characteristics. In a previous work, we have proposed an iconic language (called VCM, for Visualization of Concepts in Medicine) for representing patient conditions, treatments and laboratory tests, and we have used these icons to design a user interface that graphically indexes summaries of product characteristics. In the current study, our objective was to design and evaluate an iconic user interface for the consultation of clinical practice guidelines by physicians. METHODS: Focus groups of physicians were set up to identify the difficulties encountered when reading guidelines. Icons were integrated into Vidal Recos, taking human factors into account. The resulting interface includes a graphical summary and an iconic indexation of the guideline. The new interface was evaluated. We compared the response times and the number of errors recorded when physicians answered questions about two clinical scenarios using the interactive iconic interface or a textual interface. Users' perceived usability was evaluated with the System Usability Scale. RESULTS: The main difficulties encountered by physicians when reading guidelines were obtaining an overview and finding recommendations for patients corresponding to "particular cases". We designed a graphical interface for guideline consultation, using icons to identify particular cases and providing a graphical summary of the icons organized by anatomy and etiology. The evaluation showed that physicians gave clinical responses more rapidly with the iconic interface than the textual interface (25.2 seconds versus 45.6, p < 0.05). The physicians appreciated the new interface, and the System Usability Scale score value was 75 (between good and excellent). CONCLUSION: An interactive iconic interface can provide physicians with an overview of clinical practice guidelines, and can decrease the time required to access the content of such guidelines.

Towards evidence-based CDSSs implementing the medical reasoning contained in CPGs: application to antibiotic prescription.

UNLABELLED: Clinical practice guidelines (CPGs) are documents giving recommendations based on expert reasoning, weighing up the pros and cons of treatments on the basis of the available evidence. We propose a new approach to the construction of clinical decision support systems (CDSS), making use of the evidence-based medical reasoning used by experts in CPGs. In this study, we determined whether this approach could retrieve the recommendations for antibiotic prescription for empirical treatment in primary care. METHODS: We manually extracted, from CPGs, all the properties of antibiotics underlying recommendations for their prescription or non-prescription. We then used these properties to establish an algorithm in the form of a sequence of conditions, leading to a list of recommended antibiotics. The optimal sequence was determined by studying, for each sequence, the degree of similarity between the list of antibiotics recommended in CPGs and the list obtained with the algorithm. RESULTS: 12 antibiotic properties were used in the form of conditions in an algorithm. For 95% of clinical situations, 10 sequences retrieved the recommended treatment. DISCUSSION: This algorithm could be used in a CDSS for antibiotic treatment and would be useful for experts drawing up CPGs.

Using an iconic language to improve access to electronic medical records in general medicine.

Physicians have difficulties to access and analyse information in a medical record. In a previous work on drug databanks, we have shown that with an iconic language as VCM, an icon-based presentation can help physicians to access medical information. Our objective, herein, is to study whether VCM can be used in an electronic medical record for facilitating physician access in general practice. We identify the data and the functionalities of an electronic medical record that could benefit from VCM icons representing clinical findings, patient history, etc. We also present a preliminary evaluation of this new icon-focused interface. We conclude by discussing the results like the assessment of the user's satisfaction and pointing out the importance of coding data.

Evaluating alignment quality between iconic language and reference terminologies using similarity metrics.

BACKGROUND: Visualization of Concepts in Medicine (VCM) is a compositional iconic language that aims to ease information retrieval in Electronic Health Records (EHR), clinical guidelines or other medical documents. Using VCM language in medical applications requires alignment with medical reference terminologies. Alignment from Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) thesaurus and International Classification of Diseases - tenth revision (ICD10) to VCM are presented here. This study aim was to evaluate alignment quality between VCM and other terminologies using different measures of inter-alignment agreement before integration in EHR. METHODS: For medical literature retrieval purposes and EHR browsing, the MeSH thesaurus and the ICD10, both organized hierarchically, were aligned to VCM language. Some MeSH to VCM alignments were performed automatically but others were performed manually and validated. ICD10 to VCM alignment was entirely manually performed. Inter-alignment agreement was assessed on ICD10 codes and MeSH descriptors, sharing the same Concept Unique Identifiers in the Unified Medical Language System (UMLS). Three metrics were used to compare two VCM icons: binary comparison, crude Dice Similarity Coefficient (DSCcrude), and semantic Dice Similarity Coefficient (DSCsemantic), based on Lin similarity. An analysis of discrepancies was performed. RESULTS: MeSH to VCM alignment resulted in 10,783 relations: 1,830 of which were manually performed and 8,953 were automatically inherited. ICD10 to VCM alignment led to 19,852 relations. UMLS gathered 1,887 alignments between ICD10 and MeSH. Only 1,606 of them were used for this study. Inter-alignment agreement using only validated MeSH to VCM alignment was 74.2% [70.5-78.0]CI95%, DSCcrude was 0.93 [0.91-0.94]CI95%, and DSCsemantic was 0.96 [0.95-0.96]CI95%. Discrepancy analysis revealed that even if two thirds of errors came from the reviewers, UMLS was nevertheless responsible for one third. CONCLUSIONS: This study has shown strong overall inter-alignment agreement between MeSH to VCM and ICD10 to VCM manual alignments. VCM icons have now been integrated into a guideline search engine (http://www.cismef.org) and a health terminologies portal (http://www.hetop.eu).

Design and usability study of an iconic user interface to ease information retrieval of medical guidelines.

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVE: Doc'CISMeF (DC) is a semantic search engine used to find resources in CISMeF-BP, a quality controlled health gateway, which gathers guidelines available on the internet in French. Visualization of Concepts in Medicine (VCM) is an iconic language that may ease information retrieval tasks. This study aimed to describe the creation and evaluation of an interface integrating VCM in DC in order to make this search engine much easier to use. METHODS: Focus groups were organized to suggest ways to enhance information retrieval tasks using VCM in DC. A VCM interface was created and improved using the ergonomic evaluation approach. 20 physicians were recruited to compare the VCM interface with the non-VCM one. Each evaluator answered two different clinical scenarios in each interface. The ability and time taken to select a relevant resource were recorded and compared. A usability analysis was performed using the System Usability Scale (SUS). RESULTS: The VCM interface contains a filter based on icons, and icons describing each resource according to focus group recommendations. Some ergonomic issues were resolved before evaluation. Use of VCM significantly increased the success of information retrieval tasks (OR=11; 95% CI 1.4 to 507). Nonetheless, it took significantly more time to find a relevant resource with VCM interface (101 vs 65 s; p=0.02). SUS revealed 'good' usability with an average score of 74/100. CONCLUSIONS: VCM was successfully implemented in DC as an option. It increased the success rate of information retrieval tasks, despite requiring slightly more time, and was well accepted by end-users.

Comparison of two kinds of interface, based on guided navigation or usability principles, for improving the adoption of computerized decision support systems: application to the prescription of antibiotics.

CONTEXT: It is important to consider the way in which information is presented by the interfaces of clinical decision support systems, to favor the adoption of these systems by physicians. Interface design can focus on decision processes (guided navigation) or usability principles. OBJECTIVE: The aim of this study was to compare these two approaches in terms of perceived usability, accuracy rate, and confidence in the system. MATERIALS AND METHODS: We displayed clinical practice guidelines for antibiotic treatment via two types of interface, which we compared in a crossover design. General practitioners were asked to provide responses for 10 clinical cases and the System Usability Scale (SUS) for each interface. We assessed SUS scores, the number of correct responses, and the confidence level for each interface. RESULTS: SUS score and percentage confidence were significantly higher for the interface designed according to usability principles (81 vs 51, p=0.00004, and 88.8% vs 80.7%, p=0.004). The percentage of correct responses was similar for the two interfaces. DISCUSSION/CONCLUSION: The interface designed according to usability principles was perceived to be more usable and inspired greater confidence among physicians than the guided navigation interface. Consideration of usability principles in the construction of an interface--in particular 'effective information presentation', 'consistency', 'efficient interactions', 'effective use of language', and 'minimizing cognitive load'--seemed to improve perceived usability and confidence in the system.

A semi-automatic semantic method for mapping SNOMED CT concepts to VCM Icons.

VCM (Visualization of Concept in Medicine) is an iconic language for representing key medical concepts by icons. However, the use of this language with reference terminologies, such as SNOMED CT, will require the mapping of its icons to the terms of these terminologies. Here, we present and evaluate a semi-automatic semantic method for the mapping of SNOMED CT concepts to VCM icons. Both SNOMED CT and VCM are compositional in nature; SNOMED CT is expressed in description logic and VCM semantics are formalized in an OWL ontology. The proposed method involves the manual mapping of a limited number of underlying concepts from the VCM ontology, followed by automatic generation of the rest of the mapping. We applied this method to the clinical findings of the SNOMED CT CORE subset, and 100 randomly-selected mappings were evaluated by three experts. The results obtained were promising, with 82 of the SNOMED CT concepts correctly linked to VCM icons according to the experts. Most of the errors were easy to fix.

A guideline-derived model to facilitate the implementation of test-ordering rules within a hospital information system.

The culture of evidence-based practice includes also the field of laboratory medicine. Clinical laboratory expenditure is growing rapidly for various reasons including increased utilization. Delivering decision support to requesters at the point of care is one of the main incentives for implementing laboratory guidelines. Laboratory guidelines were analyzed to extract test-ordering rules. Each rule was explicated in at least one clinical situation with triggers that launch the execution of the implemented rule. The Unified Modeling Language was used to represent the categories of information elements found in the guidelines and underline the information elements that need to be structured and coded in the EHR. These information elements are related to conditions including clinical conditions, habits, family history, demographic information, medical treatments, laboratory tests, and non-laboratory test procedures. Timestamping of each event is also important for implementing laboratory prescription rules. A linkage between the conditions of this model and HL7 RIM was feasible. Use of this model facilitates the implementation of evidence-based test-ordering rules and clarifies the EHR requirements for successful implementation of guidelines.

Comparing the use of SNOMED CT and ICD10 for coding clinical conditions to implement laboratory guidelines.

Laboratory medicine is responsible for an important part of hospital expenditure. Providing appropriate decision support to laboratory test requesters at the point of care is one of the main incentives for implementing laboratory guidelines, which can improve medical care. Laboratory guidelines developed by local experts in the Parisian region and two national guidelines for dyslipidemia were analyzed to extract test ordering recommendations. Clinical conditions which can be a trigger to order or not to order laboratory tests were extracted and mapped with ICD10 and SNOMED CT: 43.1% of clinical conditions were matched by ICD10 whereas SNOMED CT covered 80.1% of these conditions. For the non-mapped conditions, the main problem was found to be the ambiguity of the terms used in the guidelines. Ordinal characteristics of some clinical conditions and using terms more specific than SNOMED CT were other causes of mapping failure. Applying consistent and explicit concepts in the development of guidelines would lead to better implementation. By resolving the guideline ambiguity, SNOMED CT is a good choice and covers almost all of the clinical conditions in laboratory guidelines which are needed to implement in a Clinical Decision Support System.

Designing concept maps for a precise and objective description of pharmaceutical innovations.

BACKGROUND: When a new drug is launched onto the market, information about the new manufactured product is contained in its monograph and evaluation report published by national drug agencies. Health professionals need to be able to determine rapidly and easily whether the new manufactured product is potentially useful for their practice. There is therefore a need to identify the best way to group together and visualize the main items of information describing the nature and potential impact of the new drug. The objective of this study was to identify these items of information and to bring them together in a model that could serve as the standard for presenting the main features of new manufactured product. METHODS: We developed a preliminary conceptual model of pharmaceutical innovations, based on the knowledge of the authors. We then refined this model, using a random sample of 40 new manufactured drugs recently approved by the national drug regulatory authorities in France and covering a broad spectrum of innovations and therapeutic areas. Finally, we used another sample of 20 new manufactured drugs to determine whether the model was sufficiently comprehensive. RESULTS: The results of our modeling led to three sub models described as conceptual maps representingi) the medical context for use of the new drug (indications, type of effect, therapeutical arsenal for the same indications), ii) the nature of the novelty of the new drug (new molecule, new mechanism of action, new combination, new dosage, etc.), and iii) the impact of the drug in terms of efficacy, safety and ease of use, compared with other drugs with the same indications. CONCLUSIONS: Our model can help to standardize information about new drugs released onto the market. It is potentially useful to the pharmaceutical industry, medical journals, editors of drug databases and medical software, and national or international drug regulation agencies, as a means of describing the main properties of new pharmaceutical products. It could also used as a guide for the writing of comprehensive and objective texts summarizing the nature and interest of new manufactured product.

Validating the semantics of a medical iconic language using ontological reasoning.

To help clinicians read medical texts such as clinical practice guidelines or drug monographs, we proposed an iconic language called VCM. This language can use icons to represent the main medical concepts, including diseases, symptoms, treatments and follow-up procedures, by combining various pictograms, shapes and colors. However, the semantics of this language have not been formalized, and users may create inconsistent icons, e.g. by combining the "tumor" shape and the "sleeping" pictograms into a "tumor of sleeping" icon. This work aims to represent the VCM language using DLs and OWL for evaluating its semantics by reasoners, and in particular for determining inconsistent icons. We designed an ontology for formalized the semantics of VCM icons using the Protégé editor and scripts for translating the VCM lexicon in OWL. We evaluated the ability of the ontology to determine icon consistency for a set of 100 random icons. The evaluation showed good results for determining icon consistency, with a high sensitivity. The ontology may also be useful for the design of mapping between VCM and other medical terminologies, for generating textual labels for icons, and for developing user interfaces for creating VCM icons.

Design of an original interface that facilitates the use of clinical practice guidelines of infection by physicians in primary care.

Increasing physician adherence to the clinical practice guidelines (CPG) for infections should improve antibiotic prescription practices. The aim of this study was to present the decision elements of these CPG in an original interface to be implemented in the website "Antibiocarte". We manually analyzed all CPG available for ambulatory treatment of infections. We extracted all terms related to the antibiotic therapy decisions and grouped them into decision or action variables. We then modeled the antibiotic therapy decision process and designed an interface according to ergonomic principles. The interface consists of five fixed parts: a decision table, two information zones, a zone with the reasons for hospitalization, and a zone with situations not concerned by the CPG. All CPG could be implemented according to this model. The usability of the new interface was evaluated by ten general practitioners using the System Usability Scale (SUS) and found to be satisfactory and appropriate for clinical use.

A generic system for critiquing physicians' prescriptions: usability, satisfaction and lessons learnt.

Clinical decision support systems have been developed to help physicians to take clinical guidelines into account during consultations. The ASTI critiquing module is one such systems; it provides the physician with automatic criticisms when a drug prescription does not follow the guidelines. It was initially developed for hypertension and type 2 diabetes, but is designed to be generic enough for application to all chronic diseases. We present here the results of usability and satisfaction evaluations for the ASTI critiquing module, obtained with GPs for a newly implemented guideline concerning dyslipaemia, and we discuss the lessons learnt and the difficulties encountered when building a generic DSS for critiquing physicians' prescriptions.