[Benefits and disadvantages of telemedicine]. / A telemedicina elonyei és hátrányai.

Telemedicine is used more and more frequently worldwide. It is increasingly popular in North America, Australia, South Africa, as well as the Scandinavian countries. However, it is not commonly used in Hungary despite various attempts, which is presumably due to earlier dismissive governmental attitude. In this paper the authors analyze ethical, legal and financial aspects of telemedicine from the viewpoints of physicians and patients, too. The results indicate that it cannot be clearly decided whether telemedicine is worth to apply at present. Further, introduction of telemedicine should be based on experience gained in local application.

Environmental survey of segregated habitats of Roma in Hungary: a way to be empowering and reliable in minority research.

BACKGROUND: Roma people, the largest minority in Europe live in segregated communites in several countries. The size of the Roma population is based on estimations deriving from various sources, whereas only narrative accounts of their living conditions have been available. METHODS: A comprehensive environmental survey of all settlements in Hungary (n = 3145) was carried out employing Roma field workers in order to locate and characterize segregated parts (colonies) of human habitats. Based on the collected data on environmental conditions and aggregate population numbers of the colonies, ranking of colonies and maps on their characteristics were prepared for all counties of Hungary. RESULTS: Seven hundred fifty-eight colonies were identified with approximately 134,000 inhabitants. Ninety-four percent of all colonies are populated dominantly by Roma. Most frequent environmental problems in the colonies were found to be lack of sewage and gas mains, garbage deposits, waterlogged soil and lack of water mains. CONCLUSION: Census data cannot be used for policy design aiming at those Roma who are in greatest need of help; that is, living in segregated settlements (colonies). Colonies constitute disadvantaged living conditions of varying severity which can be quantified by a composite score based on indicators of access to services and presence of environmental dangers. The proportion of colony-dwelling Roma is approximately one-fifth to one-quarter of the estimated number of Roma people in Hungary.

College students' response rate to an incentivized combination of postal and web-based health survey.

A questionnaire survey on health among students of higher education was planned. To produce a response rate high enough for the analysis in a cost-effective manner, a pilot study was carried out to test various methods of data collection. Electronic invitation by the university messaging system to fill a Web-based questionnaire, invitation by the same means to fill paper-based questionnaires at a predefined place and time with or without conditional incentives yielded response rates below 10%. Therefore, a combination of postal and Internet-based questionnaires was used for data collection enhanced with a small up-front gift and conditional incentives suggested by a student focus group. This modality resulted in a 68.6% response rate (65.2% after data cleaning). Those who responded through the Web were more likely to be males and residing in larger settlements. However, no statistically significant differences were observed on the primary health status variables with respect to modality. Use of Web-based questionnaires is recommended in combination with other data collection methods and incentives.

ICPCview: visualizing the International Classification of Primary Care.

This paper proposes a method to visualize the semantic content of data bases where the medical information is coded with the International Classification of Primary Care. The main idea is the identification of a pixel with a code and the conversion of all the data associated with these into an image the ICPCview. The method proceeds in two step, defining the reference frame and using this reference frame to visualize data. The reference frame is built by using a sign/diagnosis binary criterion, a seventeen category nosological criterion and an age ordinal criterion. The results are visualization of the signs and diagnosis of the ICPC according to gender, age and time period of the year. A limitation of the method lies in the fact that the result depends on the chosen reference frame. Further work has to be done with various reference frames and data. However the main point is that, when both the reference set of the image and of the mind of the user are built, the method is powerful at extracting the hidden content of a very large amount of data.

Caseview_HUN: easy DRG overview.

Several hospital management tools are currently used by the DRG financial system. Each case is classified into a DRG group, so it is necessary to know the distribution of hospital or departmental cases into DRG groups, and to follow the variances of this distribution. The DRG's properties include the income and expenses related to each case. There are differences in the profitability of the cases, depending on their DRG. It is important to know own expenses and the recuperated costs for every case. There are several systems for data collecting and analysis in hospitals, depending on existing hospital information systems and management. We can, however, be sure, that a DRG data collection system works in every department, because it is the basis of assessing income. The tool, which is shown in this article, facilitates an overview of the DRG, presenting the hospital's or other healthcare provider's own data. These services are supported by a platform-independent, accessible Internet application.

Improving the DRG system in Hungary.

Handling cases should be a profitable endeavour for the hospitals, but high caseloads have them running in the red. The reason for this may very well be the way the weighting is structured in the DRG system. The current way of thinking is that the indirect costs of the hospital care must be distributed on the case's days and the average of the direct costs can be added into the calculation of the DRG class's weighting factor. A dissenting opinion calls for creating the total weight proportionally by the direct costs. This paper shows an alternative, which balances both opinions by implementing corrective measures for the DRG class weigh, and thus is able to make complicated cases profitable.