The review demonstrated the interest of researchers in exploring the Learning Healthcare System ideas. However, it also revealed minimal focus on evaluating the impact of the novel paradigm on both healthcare service delivery and patient outcome.

Background Person-centred care (PCC) focusing on personalised goals and care plans derived from “What matters to you?” has an impact on single disease outcomes, but studies on multi-morbid elderly are lacking. Furthermore, the combination of PCC, Integrated Care (IC) and Pro-active care are widely recognised as desirable for multi-morbid elderly, yet previous studies focus on single components only, leaving synergies unexplored. The effect of a synergistic intervention, which implements 1) Person-centred goal-oriented care driven by “What matters to you?” with 2) IC and 3) pro-active care is unknown. Methods Inspired by theoretical foundations, complexity science, previous health service research and a patient-driven evaluation of care quality, we designed the Patient-Centred Team (PACT) intervention across primary and secondary care. The PACT team collaborate with the patient to make and deliver a person-centred, integrated and proactive multi-morbidity care-plan. The control group receives conventional care. The study design is a pragmatic six months prospective, controlled clinical trial based on hospital electronic health record data of 439 multi-morbid frail elderly at risk for emergency (re) admissions referred to PACT and 779 propensity score matched controls in Norway, 2014–2016. Outcomes are emergency admissions, the sum of emergency inpatient bed days, 30-day readmissions, planned and emergency outpatient visits and mortality at three and six months follow-up. Results The Rate Ratios (RR) for emergency admissions was 0,9 (95%CI: 0,82-0,99), for sum of emergency bed days 0,68 (95%CI:0,52-0,79) and for 30-days emergency readmissions 0,72 (95%CI: 0,41-1,24). RRs were 2,3 (95%CI: 2,02-2,55) and 0,9 (95%CI: 0,68-1,20) for planned and emergency outpatient visits respectively. The RR for death at 3 months was 0,39 (95% CI: 0,22-0,70) and 0,57 (95% CI: 0,34-0,94) at 6 months. Conclusion Compared with propensity score matched controls, the care process of frail multi-morbid elderly who received the PACT intervention had a reduced risk of high-level emergency care, increased use of low-level planned care, and substantially reduced mortality risk. Further study of process differences between groups is warranted to understand the genesis of these results better. Trial registration ClinicalTrials.gov (identifier: NCT02541474), registered Sept 2015.

BackgroundTechniques have been developed to compute statistics on distributed datasets without revealing private information except the statistical results. However, duplicate records in a distributed dataset may lead to incorrect statistical results. Therefore, to increase the accuracy of the statistical analysis of a distributed dataset, secure deduplication is an important preprocessing step.MethodsWe designed a secure protocol for the deduplication of horizontally partitioned datasets with deterministic record linkage algorithms. We provided a formal security analysis of the protocol in the presence of semi-honest adversaries. The protocol was implemented and deployed across three microbiology laboratories located in Norway, and we ran experiments on the datasets in which the number of records for each laboratory varied. Experiments were also performed on simulated microbiology datasets and data custodians connected through a local area network.ResultsThe security analysis demonstrated that the protocol protects the privacy of individuals and data custodians under a semi-honest adversarial model. More precisely, the protocol remains secure with the collusion of up to N − 2 corrupt data custodians. The total runtime for the protocol scales linearly with the addition of data custodians and records. One million simulated records distributed across 20 data custodians were deduplicated within 45 s. The experimental results showed that the protocol is more efficient and scalable than previous protocols for the same problem.ConclusionsThe proposed deduplication protocol is efficient and scalable for practical uses while protecting the privacy of patients and data custodians.Electronic supplementary materialThe online version of this article (doi:10.1186/s12911-016-0389-x) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

Symptom checkers are software tools that allow users to submit a set of symptoms and receive advice related to them in the form of a diagnosis list, health information or triage. The heterogeneity of their potential users and the number of different components in their user interfaces can make testing with end-users unaffordable. We designed and executed a two-phase method to test the respiratory diseases module of the symptom checker Erdusyk. Phase I consisted of an online test with a large sample of users (n=53). In Phase I, users evaluated the system remotely and completed a questionnaire based on the Technology Acceptance Model. Principal Component Analysis was used to correlate each section of the interface with the questionnaire responses, thus identifying which areas of the user interface presented significant contributions to the technology acceptance. In the second phase, the think-aloud procedure was executed with a small number of samples (n=15), focusing on the areas with significant contributions to analyze the reasons for such contributions. Our method was used effectively to optimize the testing of symptom checker user interfaces. The method allowed kept the cost of testing at reasonable levels by restricting the use of the think-aloud procedure while still assuring a high amount of coverage. The main barriers detected in Erdusyk were related to problems understanding time repetition patterns, the selection of levels in scales to record intensities, navigation, the quantification of some symptom attributes, and the characteristics of the symptoms.