Organizing for remote consultations in health care?-?the production process

In health care we find a very complex production process related to the complexity of disease. New telecommunications have created a novel means of contact between patient and health care worker: the remote consultation. The remote consultation is unique, with a simultaneous flow of services from different organizations. It is conceivable that analysis of the production process of remote consultations may contribute to improved organization of the work. To obtain information on the little analysed production process of remote consultations, qualitative interviews were performed with 30 persons working in teledermatology, telepsychiatry, a telepathology frozen-section service, and tele-otolaryngology. The results show that managers in organizations planning telemedicine activity do not need to prepare the personnel by organizing communication on goal formulation and content for the remote consultations. For the single health care worker a remote consultation does not require more preparation than an ordinary consultation. The variation in type of images seen on the screen here does not seem to play a major role. Evaluation of each step mainly shows that the production process of remote consultations functions well. The most frequently mentioned problems are technical problems (which should not be exaggerated), but other problems also exist. Proposals for improvements were given, such as wishing that a technician was available, and improved booking systems. The main conclusion is that no major reorganization seems to be necessary for the production process of remote consultations. This type of telecooperation works well.     

Shared 3-D workplace exhibitions as sites for community meetings

In health care we find a very complex production process related to the complexity of disease. New telecommunications have created a novel means of contact between patient and health care worker: the remote consultation. The remote consultation is unique, with a simultaneous flow of services from different organizations. It is conceivable that analysis of the production process of remote consultations may contribute to improved organization of the work. To obtain information on the little analysed production process of remote consultations, qualitative interviews were performed with 30 persons working in teledermatology, telepsychiatry, a telepathology frozen-section service, and tele-otolaryngology. The results show that managers in organizations planning telemedicine activity do not need to prepare the personnel by organizing communication on goal formulation and content for the remote consultations. For the single health care worker a remote consultation does not require more preparation than an ordinary consultation. The variation in type of images seen on the screen here does not seem to play a major role. Evaluation of each step mainly shows that the production process of remote consultations functions well. The most frequently mentioned problems are technical problems (which should not be exaggerated), but other problems also exist. Proposals for improvements were given, such as wishing that a technician was available, and improved booking systems. The main conclusion is that no major reorganization seems to be necessary for the production process of remote consultations. This type of telecooperation works well.     

Predicting flow conditions over stepped chutes based on ANFIS

Chute flow may be either smooth or stepped. The flow conditions in stepped chutes have been classified into nappe, transition and skimming flows. In this paper, characteristics of flow conditions are presented systematically under a wide range of critical flow depth, step height and chute slope. The Adaptive Network Based Fuzzy Inference System (ANFIS) is used to predict flow conditions in stepped chutes using critical flow depth, step height and chute slope information. The proposed model performance is determined by threefold cross validation method. The evaluated classification accuracy of ANFIS model is 99.01%. The test results showed that the proposed ANFIS model can be used successfully for complex process control in hydraulic systems.     

Care transitions in the outpatient surgery preoperative process: facilitators and obstacles to information flow and their consequences

Patient care transitions have been shown to be critical points at which failure as well as recovery from potential failure may occur. The purpose of this research was to identify transitions in patient care and the flow of associated information at different steps in the outpatient surgery preoperative care process and, in turn, attempt to identify breakdowns in the information flow process and their ramifications. A study of one organization’s preoperative process for outpatient surgery was conducted, employing four means of data collection to gather information on preoperative work processes: employee shadowing, patient shadowing, clinic observation, and dictated feedback. Various facilitators and obstacles in information flow were found to be present in the preoperative care process. Obstacles often resulted in negative consequences for healthcare providers and patients. Helping care providers understand how their actions affect the various elements of the preoperative process, through improved awareness, may be one way to improve information flow problems within the outpatient surgery process.     

不同信息共享程度下交通拥塞控制研究

信息共享程度是影响交通通行效率的重要条件。分析了信息闭塞、局部信息共享和全局信息共享三种信息共享模式下的交通拥塞现象及其传播特征,并对网络节点行为进行动力学分析,采用概率母函数、分支过程和协调博弈的方法建立了交通拥塞传播模型,解析分析了交通拥塞传播的临界值,比较了不同信息共享模式下的交通拥塞控制策略。仿真实验表明,信息闭塞和局部信息共享下的拥塞控制在交通网络流量较小时更为有效,全局信息共享有利于抑制大规模的拥塞传播,但其可控难度较大。     

Preserving privacy information flow security in composite service evolution

After a composite service is deployed, user privacy requirements and trust levels of component services are subject to variation. When the changes occur, it is critical to preserve privacy information flow security. We propose an approach to preserve privacy information flow security in composite service evolution. First, a privacy data item dependency analysis method based on a Petri net model is presented. Then the set of privacy data items collected by each component service is derived through a privacy data item dependency graph, and the security scope of each component service is calculated. Finally, the evolution operations that preserve privacy information flow security are defined. By applying these evolution operations, the re-verification process is avoided and the evolution efficiency is improved. To illustrate the effectiveness of our approach, a case study is presented. The experimental results indicate that our approach has high evolution efficiency and can greatly reduce the cost of evolution compared with re-verifying the entire composite service.     

Information leak detection in business process models: Theory,application, and tool support

Despite the correct deployment of access control mechanisms, information leaks can persist and threaten the reliability of business process execution. This paper presents an automated and effective approach for the verification of information flow control for business process models. Building on the concept of place-based non-interference and declassification, the core contribution of this paper is the application of Petri net reachability to detect places in which information leaks occur. Such a feature allows for the use of state-of-the-art tool support to model-check business process models and detect leaks. We show that the approach is sound and complete, and present the Anica tool to identify leaks. An extensive evaluation comprising over 550 industrial process models is carried out and shows that information flow analysis of process models can be done in milliseconds. This motivates a tight integration of business process modeling and non-interference checking.     

移动Agent环境下物流信息系统模型的研究

有效处理全局信息及较好适应环境变化,是物流信息系统发挥作用的关键因素。但目前物流信息系统这两方面的能力都明显不足。为此,文章提出了一种基于移动Agent环境的物流信息系统模型,并分析了主要部分的功能及工作流程。该模型有效地提高了系统对全局信息的处理能力,增强了系统对环境的适应能力及可重构性。     

A scoring model to detect abusive billing patterns in health insurance claims

We propose a scoring model that detects outpatient clinics with abusive utilization patterns based on profiling information extracted from electronic insurance claims. The model consists of (1) scoring to quantify the degree of abusiveness and (2) segmentation to categorize the problematic providers with similar utilization patterns. We performed the modeling for 3705 Korean internal medicine clinics. We applied data from practitioner claims submitted to the National Health Insurance Corporation for outpatient care during the 3rd quarter of 2007 and used 4th quarter data to validate the model. We considered the Health Insurance Review and Assessment Services decisions on interventions to be accurate for model validation. We compared the conditional probability distributions of the composite degree of anomaly (CDA) score formulated for intervention and non-intervention groups. To assess the validity of the model, we examined confusion matrices by intervention history and group as defined by the CDA score. The CDA aggregated 38 indicators of abusiveness for individual clinics, which were grouped based on the CDAs, and we used the decision tree to further segment them into homogeneous clusters based on their utilization patterns. The validation indicated that the proposed model was largely consistent with the manual detection techniques currently used to identify potential abusers. The proposed model, which can be used to automate abuse detection, is flexible and easy to update. It may present an opportunity to fight escalating healthcare costs in the era of increasing availability of electronic healthcare information.     

基于偏好的双边多议题协商优化

提出一种优化的自动协商模型。Agent在信知不完全的情况下通过学习交互历史和在线协商信息获取对手的偏好,结合贝叶斯方法和支持向量机学习对手偏好,基于保留值和权重提出一种决策模型。通过实验比较和分析,该模型能有效降低协商次数,提高协商双方的联合效用。在信息保密和先验知识未知的环境下,该模型仍然表现出了较高的效用和效率。     

用信息流控制保证软件可信运行

提出一种基于信息流控制来保证软件可信运行的方法。首先设计一种信息流控制模型,该模型的访问规则、传播规则和感染规则基本涵盖了软件在操作系统运行过程中产生信息流的主要类型。其次,设计一种策略描述语言,该语言使软件管理者可以以一种较为直观的方式描述所期望的软件信息流。在Linux内核部分实现原型系统,实验证明该方法可以控制软件所产生的信息流,从信息流角度保证软件的可信运行。     

A Petri nets semantics for data flow networks

This work presents a truly concurrent operational semantics for nondeterministic data flow networks. We introduce a model, the df-process, which is a notion similar to that of non-sequential process for a Petri net: a df-process is defined as a mapping from an occurrence net K to a data flow net N, such that the places and the transitions of K are mapped onto the channels and the nodes of N. A df-process contains, by means of some labelling of the places, information on the value and the order in which data flow through the channels during a computation. Df-processes for a data flow network are characterized in an abstract way by a set of properties and in general a df-process corresponds to a set of computations of the network. We give a way to build the df-process corresponding to a computation incrementally at each event occurrence: a main result of the paper is that the incremental construction yields exactly the same set of df-processes as abstractly defined. We also show that df-processes are compositional. The model is intended to be used by distributed systems designers: it contains enough information to be a guideline for the designer and to be a base to develop dynamic checking tools. We outline how df-processes can be used in the design phase of a system.Research supported in part by Progetto Coordinato CNR ANATRA     

Computer-aided process planning—State of the art and future development

Computer-aided process planning (CAPP) is regarded as the critical link between design and manufacturing. Particularly in the integration of computer-aided manufacturing, process planning plays an outstanding role in the integrated flow of information.This paper gives a broad view of today's situation in computer-aided process planning in a real industrial environment. Characteristics for the classification of CAPP systems are derived and the main trends in the future development of CAPP software are pointed out. Feature-based modelling of manufacturing processes as the basis for integration-oriented software development is briefly described.     

An extended banker's algorithm for deadlock avoidance

We describe a natural extension of the banker's algorithm (D.W. Dijkstra, 1968) for deadlock avoidance in operating systems. Representing the control flow of each process as a rooted tree of nodes corresponding to resource requests and releases, we propose a quadratic-time algorithm which decomposes each flow graph into a nested family of regions, such that all allocated resources are released before the control leaves a region. Also, information on the maximum resource claims for each of the regions can be extracted prior to process execution. By inserting operating system calls when entering a new region for each process at runtime, and applying the original banker's algorithm for deadlock avoidance, this method has the potential to achieve better resource utilization because information on the “localized approximate maximum claims” is used for testing system safety     

Semantic conflict resolution ontology (SCROL): an ontology for detecting and resolving data and schema-level semantic conflicts

Establishing semantic interoperability among heterogeneous information sources has been a critical issue in the database community for the past two decades. Despite the critical importance, current approaches to semantic interoperability of heterogeneous databases have not been sufficiently effective. We propose a common ontology called semantic conflict resolution ontology (SCROL) that addresses the inherent difficulties in the conventional approaches, i.e., federated schema and domain ontology approaches. SCROL provides a systematic method for automatically detecting and resolving various semantic conflicts in heterogeneous databases. SCROL provides a dynamic mechanism of comparing and manipulating contextual knowledge of each information source, which is useful in achieving semantic interoperability among heterogeneous databases. We show how SCROL is used for detecting and resolving semantic conflicts between semantically equivalent schema and data elements. In addition, we present evaluation results to show that SCROL can be successfully used to automate the process of identifying and resolving semantic conflicts.     

Flow-sensitive, context-sensitive, and object-sensitive information flow control based on program dependence graphs

Information flow control (IFC) checks whether a program can leak secret data to public ports, or whether critical computations can be influenced from outside. But many IFC analyses are imprecise, as they are flow-insensitive, context-insensitive, or object-insensitive; resulting in false alarms. We argue that IFC must better exploit modern program analysis technology, and present an approach based on program dependence graphs (PDG). PDGs have been developed over the last 20 years as a standard device to represent information flow in a program, and today can handle realistic programs. In particular, our dependence graph generator for full Java bytecode is used as the basis for an IFC implementation which is more precise and needs less annotations than traditional approaches. We explain PDGs for sequential and multi-threaded programs, and explain precision gains due to flow-, context-, and object-sensitivity. We then augment PDGs with a lattice of security levels and introduce the flow equations for IFC. We describe algorithms for flow computation in detail and prove their correctness. We then extend flow equations to handle declassification, and prove that our algorithm respects monotonicity of release. Finally, examples demonstrate that our implementation can check realistic sequential programs in full Java bytecode.     

基于LDRA Testbed的民用机载软件静态测试方法

静态测试作为软件测试的重要方法,是保证民用机载软件中安全关键软件质量的关键步骤。介绍静态测试的概念和方法,采用自动化分析方法,基于软件分析工具LDRA Testbed从主要静态分析、复杂度分析、静态数据流、交叉索引、信息流和数据对象分析六大部分完成软件的静态测试过程,探究其测试原理和关键标准文件的配置,生成相应的代码审查和测试度量报告,以有效提高民用机载软件质量。     

面向信息流的安全模型与评估综述

对系统进行攻击的本质之一是在信息流动过程中的非授权泄露与修改,进而破坏系统的安全性,这使得非常有必要对信息流的安全进行分析。从安全保障目标和安全保障方式上对安全信息流模型进行了分类,综述了不同类型的信息流模型研究现状,分析了现有面向信息流的量化评估方法,展望了面向信息流安全评估的发展趋势。     

Data fusion for high spatial resolution LAI estimation

Leaf Area Index (LAI) is a critical variable for forest management. It is difficult to obtain accurate LAI estimations of high spatial resolution over large areas. Local estimations can be obtained from in situ field measurements. Extrapolation of local measurements is prone to error. Remote sensing LAI estimation products, such as the one provided by MODIS are of very low resolution and subject to criticism in recent validation works. Forest management requires increasingly high resolution estimations of LAI. We propose a data fusion process for high spatial resolution estimation of the LAI over a large area, combining several heterogeneous information sources: field sampled data, elevation data and remote sensing data. The process makes use of spatial interpolation techniques. We follow a hybrid validation approach that combines the conventional prediction error measures with a spatial validation based on image segmentation. We obtain encouraging results of this information fusion process on data from a forest area in the north of Portugal.     

一种新型的作战指挥流程效能评估模型

为建立作战指挥流程效能的评估模型,定义在某一种指挥流程下,指挥信息传递过程中信息流通迅速程度的度量称为指挥流的“时效”,以“时效”的大小作为衡量流程效能的高低。“反馈”是作战指挥流程中常见的情况,根据实际情况确立了“反馈”流程的非线性反馈函数。此方法为优化指挥流程提供了一种科学有效的定量分析途径。