Journal Articles
Permanent URI for this collectionhttps://mro.massey.ac.nz/handle/10179/7915
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Item Synthea: An approach, method, and software mechanism for generating synthetic patients and the synthetic electronic health care record(Oxford University Press (OUP), 30/08/2017) Walonoski J; Kramer M; Nichols J; Quina A; Moesel; Hall D; Duffett C; Dube K; Gallagher T; McLachlan SObjective: Our objective is to create a source of synthetic electronic health records that is readily available; suited to industrial, innovation, research, and educational uses; and free of legal, privacy, security, and intellectual property restrictions. Materials and Methods: We developed Synthea, an open-source software package that simulates the lifespans of synthetic patients, modeling the 10 most frequent reasons for primary care encounters and the 10 chronic conditions with the highest morbidity in the United States. Results: Synthea adheres to a previously developed conceptual framework, scales via open-source deployment on the Internet, and may be extended with additional disease and treatment modules developed by its user community. One million synthetic patient records are now freely available online, encoded in standard formats (eg, Health Level-7 [HL7] Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources [FHIR] and Consolidated-Clinical Document Architecture), and accessible through an HL7 FHIR application program interface. Discussion: Health care lags other industries in information technology, data exchange, and interoperability. The lack of freely distributable health records has long hindered innovation in health care. Approaches and tools are available to inexpensively generate synthetic health records at scale without accidental disclosure risk, lowering current barriers to entry for promising early-stage developments. By engaging a growing community of users, the synthetic data generated will become increasingly comprehensive, detailed, and realistic over time. Conclusion: Synthetic patients can be simulated with models of disease progression and corresponding standards of care to produce risk-free realistic synthetic health care records at scale.Item Towards standardisation of evidence-based clinical care process specifications(SAGE Journals, 2020-12) McLachlan S; Kyrimi E; Dube K; Hitman G; Simmonds J; Fenton NThere is a strong push towards standardisation of treatment approaches, care processes and documentation of clinical practice. However, confusion persists regarding terminology and description of many clinical care process specifications which this research seeks to resolve by developing a taxonomic characterisation of clinical care process specifications. Literature on clinical care process specifications was analysed, creating the starting point for identifying common characteristics and how each is constructed and used in the clinical setting. A taxonomy for clinical care process specifications is presented. The De Bleser approach to limited clinical care process specifications characterisation was extended and each clinical care process specification is successfully characterised in terms of purpose, core elements and relationship to the other clinical care process specification types. A case study on the diagnosis and treatment of Type 2 Diabetes in the United Kingdom was used to evaluate the taxonomy and demonstrate how the characterisation framework applies. Standardising clinical care process specifications ensures that the format and content are consistent with expectations, can be read more quickly and high-quality information can be recorded about the patient. Standardisation also enables computer interpretability, which is important in integrating Learning Health Systems into the modern clinical environment. The approach presented allows terminologies for clinical care process specifications that were widely used interchangeably to be easily distinguished, thus, eliminating the existing confusion.
