Teleconsultation demand classification and service analysis.
Ontology highlight
ABSTRACT: Background
To enhance teleconsultation management, demands can be classified into different patterns, and the service of each pattern demand can be improved.Methods
For the effective teleconsultation classification, a novel ensemble hierarchical clustering method is proposed in this study. In the proposed method, individual clustering results are first obtained by different hierarchical clustering methods, and then ensembled by one-hot encoding, the calculation and division of cosine similarity, and network graph representation. In the built network graph about the high cosine similarity, the connected demand series can be categorized into one pattern. For verification, 43 teleconsultation demand series are used as sample data, and the efficiency and quality of teleconsultation services are respectively analyzed before and after the demand classification.Results
The teleconsultation demands are classified into three categories, erratic, lumpy, and slow. Under the fixed strategies, the service analysis after demand classification reveals the deficiencies of teleconsultation services, but analysis before demand classification can't.Conclusion
The proposed ensemble hierarchical clustering method can effectively category teleconsultation demands, and the effective demand categorization can enhance teleconsultation management.
SUBMITTER: Chen W
PROVIDER: S-EPMC8379888 | biostudies-literature |
REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature
Similar Datasets
Project description:To enhance the forecasting accuracy of daily teleconsultation demand, this study proposes an ensemble hybrid deep learning model. The proposed ensemble CNN attention-based BILSTM model (ECA-BILSTM) combines shallow convolutional neural networks (CNNs), attention mechanisms, and bidirectional long short-term memory (BILSTM). Moreover, additional variables are selected according to the characteristics of teleconsultation demand and added to the inputs of forecasting models. To verify the superiority of ECA-BILSTM and the effectiveness of additional variables, two actual teleconsultation datasets collected in the National Telemedicine Center of China (NTCC) are used as the experimental data. Results showed that ECA-BILSTMs can significantly outperform corresponding benchmark models. And two key additional variables were identified for teleconsultation demand prediction improvement. Overall, the proposed ECA-BILSTM model with effective additional variables is a feasible promising approach in teleconsultation demand forecasting.
| S-EPMC8391747 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Phosphatidylinositol is the parent lipid for the synthesis of seven phosphorylated inositol lipids and each of them play specific roles in numerous processes including receptor-mediated signalling, actin cytoskeleton dynamics and membrane trafficking. PI synthesis is localised to the endoplasmic reticulum (ER) whilst its phosphorylated derivatives are found in other organelles where the lipid kinases also reside. Phosphorylation of PI to phosphatidylinositol (4,5) bisphosphate (PI(4,5)P2) at the plasma membrane and to phosphatidylinositol 4-phosphate (PI4P) at the Golgi are key events in lipid signalling and Golgi function respectively. Here we review a family of proteins, phosphatidylinositol transfer proteins (PITPs), that can mobilise PI from the ER to provide the substrate to the resident kinases for phosphorylation. Recent studies identify specific and overlapping functions for the three soluble PITPs (PITPα, PITPβ and PITPNC1) in phospholipase C signalling, neuronal function, membrane trafficking, viral replication and in cancer metastases.
| S-EPMC8266687 | biostudies-literature
Project description:BackgroundDue to the increasing complexity in socioeconomic environments and the ambiguity in human cognition, decision makers prefer to give linguistic cognitive information with different granularities according to their own preferences. Consequently, to consider the uncertainty and preferences in the evaluation process, a method based on Multi-Granularity Linguistic Information (MGLI) for evaluating teleconsultation service quality is proposed, which provides a new research direction for scientific evaluation and improvement of teleconsultation service quality.MethodsFirstly, this paper explored a service quality evaluation system from the perspective of regional doctors. And then considering the uncertainty and preferences of decision makers, MGLI was used to optimize the index system according to the similarity degree between the linguistic evaluation information and a given linguistic term set. Finally, the empirical research was conducted using Henan Province Telemedicine Center of China (HTCC) as an example to identify the direction for improving the service quality in teleconsultation.ResultsThis study found that the number of consulting rooms, attitude of operators, consultation duration, charges, and attitude of experts are the key factors affecting the quality of teleconsultation service.ConclusionsSuggestions for improving the quality of teleconsultation service are put forward in terms of optimizing the allocation of consulting rooms, improving regional doctors' experience and standardizing charging standards, which provides a new direction for improving the quality of teleconsultation service.
| S-EPMC7301990 | biostudies-literature
Project description:BackgroundOver the last decade, telemedicine services have been introduced in the public health care systems of several industrialized countries. In Catalonia, the use of eConsulta, an asynchronous teleconsultation service between primary care professionals and citizens in the public health care system, has already reached 1 million cases. Before the COVID-19 pandemic, the use of eConsulta was growing at a monthly rate of 7%, and the growth has been exponential from March 15, 2020 to the present day. Despite its widespread usage, there is little qualitative evidence describing how this tool is used.ObjectiveThe aim of this study was to annotate a random sample of teleconsultations from eConsulta, and to evaluate the level of agreement between health care professionals with respect to the annotation.MethodsTwenty general practitioners retrospectively annotated a random sample of 5382 cases managed by eConsulta according to three aspects: the type of interaction according to 6 author-proposed categories, whether the practitioners believed a face-to-face visit was avoided, and whether they believed the patient would have requested a face-to-face visit had eConsulta not been available. A total of 1217 cases were classified three times by three different professionals to assess the degree of consensus among them.ResultsThe general practitioners considered that 79.60% (4284/5382) of the teleconsultations resulted in avoiding a face-to-face visit, and considered that 64.96% (3496/5382) of the time, the patient would have made a face-to-face visit in the absence of a service like eConsulta. The most frequent uses were for management of test results (26.77%, 1433/5354), management of repeat prescriptions (24.30%, 1301/5354), and medical enquiries (14.23%, 762/5354). The degree of agreement among professionals as to the annotations was mixed, with the highest consensus demonstrated for the question "Has the online consultation avoided a face-to-face visit?" (3/3 professionals agreed 67.95% of the time, 827/1217), and the lowest consensus for the type of use of the teleconsultation (3/3 professionals agreed 57.60% of the time, 701/1217).ConclusionsThis study shows the ability of eConsulta to reduce the number of face-to-face visits for 55% (79% × 65%) to 79% of cases. In comparison to previous research, these results are slightly more pessimistic, although the rates are still high and in line with administrative data proxies, showing that 84% of patients using teleconsultations do not make an in-person appointment in the following 3 months. With respect to the type of consultation performed, our results are similar to the existing literature, thus providing robust support for eConsulta's usage. The mixed degree of consensus among professionals implies that results derived from artificial intelligence tools such as message classification algorithms should be interpreted in light of these shortcomings.
| S-EPMC7530682 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Recently, manufacturing firms and logistics service providers have been encouraged to deploy the most recent features of Information Technology (IT) to prevail in the competitive circumstances of manufacturing industries. Industry 4.0 and Cloud manufacturing (CMfg), accompanied by a service-oriented architecture model, have been regarded as renowned approaches to enable and facilitate the transition of conventional manufacturing business models into more efficient and productive ones. Furthermore, there is an aptness among the manufacturing and logistics businesses as service providers to synergize and cut down the investment and operational costs via sharing logistics fleet and production facilities in the form of outsourcing and consequently increase their profitability. Therefore, due to the Everything as a Service (XaaS) paradigm, efficient service composition is known to be a remarkable issue in the cloud manufacturing paradigm. This issue is challenging due to the service composition problem's large size and complicated computational characteristics. This paper has focused on the considerable number of continually received service requests, which must be prioritized and handled in the minimum possible time while fulfilling the Quality of Service (QoS) parameters. Considering the NP-hard nature and dynamicity of the allocation problem in the Cloud composition problem, heuristic and metaheuristic solving approaches are strongly preferred to obtain optimal or nearly optimal solutions. This study has presented an innovative, time-efficient approach for mutual manufacturing and logistical service composition with the QoS considerations. The method presented in this paper is highly competent in solving large-scale service composition problems time-efficiently while satisfying the optimality gap. A sample dataset has been synthesized to evaluate the outcomes of the developed model compared to earlier research studies. The results show the proposed algorithm can be applied to fulfill the dynamic behavior of manufacturing and logistics service composition due to its efficiency in solving time. The paper has embedded the relation of task and logistic services for cloud service composition in solving algorithm and enhanced the efficiency of resulted matched services. Moreover, considering the possibility of arrival of new services and demands into cloud, the proposed algorithm adapts the service composition algorithm.
| S-EPMC8080429 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Declines in insect pollinators across Europe have raised concerns about the supply of pollination services to agriculture. Simultaneously, EU agricultural and biofuel policies have encouraged substantial growth in the cultivated area of insect pollinated crops across the continent. Using data from 41 European countries, this study demonstrates that the recommended number of honeybees required to provide crop pollination across Europe has risen 4.9 times as fast as honeybee stocks between 2005 and 2010. Consequently, honeybee stocks were insufficient to supply >90% of demands in 22 countries studied. These findings raise concerns about the capacity of many countries to cope with major losses of wild pollinators and highlight numerous critical gaps in current understanding of pollination service supplies and demands, pointing to a pressing need for further research into this issue.
| S-EPMC3885438 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Floating Catchment Area (FCA) methods are a popular tool to investigate accessibility to public facilities, in particular health care services. FCA approaches are attractive because, unlike other accessibility measures, they take into account the potential for congestion of facilities. This is done by 1) considering the population within the catchment area of a facility to calculate a variable that measures level of service, and then 2) aggregating the level of service by population centers subject to catchment area constraints. In this paper we discuss an effect of FCA approaches, an artifact that we term demand and level of service inflation. These artifacts are present in previous implementations of FCA methods. We argue that inflation makes interpretation of estimates of accessibility difficult, which has possible deleterious consequences for decision making. Next, we propose a simple and intuitive approach to proportionally allocate demandand and level of service in FCA calculations. The approach is based on a standardization of the impedance matrix, similar to approaches popular in the spatial statistics and econometrics literature. The result is a more intiuitive measure of accessibility that 1) provides a local version of the provider-to-population ratio; and 2) preserves the level of demand and the level of supply in a system. We illustrate the relevant issues with some examples, and then empirically by means of a case study of accessibility to family physicians in the Hamilton Census Metropolitan Area (CMA), in Ontario, Canada. Results indicate that demand and supply inflation/deflation affect the interpretation of accessibility analysis using existing FCA methods, and that the proposed adjustment can lead to more intuitive results.
| S-EPMC6597094 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Biomass for bioenergy is debated for its potential synergies or tradeoffs with other provisioning and regulating ecosystem services (ESS). This biomass may originate from different production systems and may be purposefully grown or obtained from residues. Increased concerns globally about the sustainable production of biomass for bioenergy has resulted in numerous certification schemes focusing on best management practices, mostly operating at the plot/field scale. In this study, we compare the ESS of two watersheds in the southeastern US. We show the ESS tradeoffs and synergies of plantation forestry, i.e., pine poles, and agricultural production, i.e., wheat straw and corn stover, with the counterfactual natural or semi-natural forest in both watersheds. The plantation forestry showed less distinct tradeoffs than did corn and wheat production, i.e., for carbon storage, P and sediment retention, groundwater recharge, and biodiversity. Using indicators of landscape composition and configuration, we showed that landscape planning can affect the overall ESS supply and can partly determine if locally set environmental thresholds are being met. Indicators on landscape composition, configuration and naturalness explained more than 30% of the variation in ESS supply. Landscape elements such as largely connected forest patches or more complex agricultural patches, e.g., mosaics with shrub and grassland patches, may enhance ESS supply in both of the bioenergy production systems. If tradeoffs between biomass production and other ESS are not addressed by landscape planning, it may be reasonable to include rules in certification schemes that require, e.g., the connectivity of natural or semi-natural forest patches in plantation forestry or semi-natural landscape elements in agricultural production systems. Integrating indicators on landscape configuration and composition into certification schemes is particularly relevant considering that certification schemes are governance tools used to ensure comparable sustainability standards for biomass produced in countries with variable or absent legal frameworks for landscape planning.
| S-EPMC4359142 | biostudies-literature
Project description:This paper presents a limited-stop service for a bus fleet to meet the unbalanced demand of passengers on a bus route and to improve the transit service of the bus route. This strategy includes two parts: a degree assessment of unbalanced passenger demand and an optimization of the limited-stop service. The degree assessment of unbalanced passenger demand, which is based on the different passenger demand between stations and the unbalance of passengers within the station, is used to judge whether implementing the limited-stop service is necessary for a bus route. The optimization of limited-stop service considers the influence of stop skipping action and bus capacity on the left-over passengers to determine the proper skipping stations for the bus fleet serving the entire route by minimizing both the waiting time and in-vehicle time of passengers and the running time of vehicles. A solution algorithm based on genetic algorithm is also presented to evaluate the degree of unbalanced passenger demand and optimize the limited-stop scheme. Then, the proper strategy is tested on a bus route in Changchun city of China. The threshold of degree assessment of unbalanced passenger demand can be calibrated and adapted to different passenger demands.
| S-EPMC5837195 | biostudies-literature
Project description:BackgroundMale circumcision is almost universal in North and West Africa, and practiced for various reasons. Yet there is little documentation on service delivery, clinical procedures, policies, and programmatic strategies. The United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) commissioned country program reviews in 2014 to shed light on the delivery of male circumcision services for infants in Cameroon and Senegal.MethodsWe conducted a policy desk review, key informant interviews, and focus group discussions at health centers and in communities. Between December 2014 and January 2015, we conducted 21 key informant interviews (13 with regional and district officers, 5 with national officers, and 3 with UNICEF officials) and 36 focus group discussions (6 with men, 6 with women, 12 with adolescent boys, and 12 with service providers). Some of the men and women were parents of the adolescents who participated in the focus group discussions. In the French-speaking areas, the focus group discussions were conducted in French through an accredited translator, audio recorded, and transcribed into English.ResultsAll of the facilities we visited in Cameroon and Senegal offer medical male circumcision, with 10 out of 12 performing early infant male circumcision (EIMC) routinely. Neither country has policies, guidelines, or strategies for EIMC. The procedure is done mainly by untrained service providers, with some providers using modern circumcision devices. There are no key messages on EIMC for families; the increasing demand for EIMC is led by the community.ConclusionDespite the absence of national policies and strategies, EIMC is routinely offered at all levels of the health care system in Cameroon and Senegal, mainly by untrained service providers. Improving circumcision services will require guidelines for EIMC and improvements in training, equipment, supply chains, recordkeeping, and demand creation.
| S-EPMC4944576 | biostudies-literature