Background Despite accumulating evidence concerning the association between daily step counts and mortality or disease risks, it is unclear whether daily step counts are associated with healthy life years. Methods We used the combined dataset of the Comprehensive Survey of Living Conditions and the National Health and Nutrition Survey conducted for a randomly sampled general population in Japan, 2019. Daily step counts were measured for 4957 adult participants. The associations of daily step counts with activity limitations in daily living and self-assessed health were evaluated using a multiv ..read more

Objectives Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center (MSK) sought to empower patients and caregivers to be more proactive in requesting ethics consultations. Methods Functionality was developed on MSK’s electronic patient portal that allowed patients and/or caregivers to request ethics consultations. The Ethics Consultation Service (ECS) responded to all requests, which were documented and analysed. Results Of the 74 requests made through the portal, only one fell under the purview of the ECS. The others were primarily requests for assistance with coordinating clinical care, hospital resources or ..read more

Background Optimal timing for initiating maintenance dialysis in patients with chronic kidney disease (CKD) stages 3–5 is challenging. This study aimed to develop and validate a machine learning (ML) model for early personalised prediction of maintenance dialysis initiation within 1-year and 3-year timeframes among patients with CKD stages 3–5. Methods Retrospective electronic health record data from the Taipei Medical University clinical research database were used. Newly diagnosed patients with CKD stages 3–5 between 2008 and 2017 were identified. The observation period spanned from the diag ..read more

Background High-risk emergency department (ED) revisit is considered an important quality indicator that may reflect an increase in complications and medical burden. However, because of its multidimensional and highly complex nature, this factor has not been comprehensively investigated. This study aimed to predict high-risk ED revisit with a machine-learning (ML) approach. Methods This 3-year retrospective cohort study assessed adult patients between January 2019 and December 2021 from National Taiwan University Hospital Hsin-Chu Branch with high-risk ED revisit, defined as hospital or intens ..read more

Objectives To explore the views of intensive care professionals in high-income countries (HICs) and lower-to-middle-income countries (LMICs) regarding the use and implementation of artificial intelligence (AI) technologies in intensive care units (ICUs). Methods Individual semi-structured qualitative interviews were conducted between December 2021 and August 2022 with 59 intensive care professionals from 24 countries. Transcripts were analysed using conventional content analysis. Results Participants had generally positive views about the potential use of AI in ICUs but also reported some well ..read more

Objectives Incident reporting systems are widely used to identify risks and enable organisational learning. Free-text descriptions contain important information about factors associated with incidents. This study aimed to develop error scores by extracting information about the presence of error factors in incidents using an original decision-making model that partly relies on natural language processing techniques. Methods We retrospectively analysed free-text data from reports of incidents between January 2012 and December 2022 from Nagoya University Hospital, Japan. The sample data were ran ..read more

Background Technological devices such as smartphones, wearables and virtual assistants enable health data collection, serving as digital alternatives to conventional biomarkers. We aimed to provide a systematic overview of emerging literature on ‘digital biomarkers,’ covering definitions, features and citations in biomedical research. Methods We analysed all articles in PubMed that used ‘digital biomarker(s)’ in title or abstract, considering any study involving humans and any review, editorial, perspective or opinion-based articles up to 8 March 2023. We systematically extracted characteristi ..read more

Objective The objective is to explore the impact of the pandemic shock on the unmet medical needs of middle-aged and older adults worldwide. Methods The COVID-19 pandemic starting in 2020 was used as a quasiexperiment. Exposure to the pandemic was defined based on an individual’s context within the global pandemic. Data were obtained from the Integrated Values Surveys. A total of 11 932 middle-aged and older adults aged 45 years and above from 10 countries where the surveys conducted two times during 2011 and 2022 were analysed. We used logistic regression models with the difference-in-differe ..read more

Objectives The objective of this study was to explore the feature of generative artificial intelligence (AI) in asking sexual health among cancer survivors, which are often challenging for patients to discuss. Methods We employed the Generative Pre-trained Transformer-3.5 (GPT) as the generative AI platform and used DocsBot for citation retrieval (June 2023). A structured prompt was devised to generate 100 questions from the AI, based on epidemiological survey data regarding sexual difficulties among cancer survivors. These questions were submitted to Bot1 (standard GPT) and Bot2 (sourced from ..read more

Objectives This project aimed to determine where health technology can support best-practice perioperative care for patients waiting for surgery. Methods An exploratory codesign process used personas and journey mapping in three interprofessional workshops to identify key challenges in perioperative care across four health districts in Sydney, Australia. Through participatory methodology, the research inquiry directly involved perioperative clinicians. In three facilitated workshops, clinician and patient participants codesigned potential digital interventions to support perioperative pathways ..read more