News by Subject Social & Behavior

A new electronic decision support tool for managing asthma has the potential to improve the quality of asthma care in primary care settings, suggests a study led by St. Michael's Hospital in Toronto, Canada.

St. Jude Children's Research Hospital researchers used a comprehensive method to reduce drug interaction alerts, improving electronic health record systems to lower alert fatigue and increase patient safety.

Researchers examined 203 samples from 12 key targeted species collected from various importers, processing plants and retailers in Ontario. Of the samples, 141 were from retailers, 51 from importers and 11 from processing plants. The findings revealed 32 per cent of the samples overall were mislabelled. The mislabelling rate was 17.6 per cent at the import stage, 27.3 per cent at processing plants and 38.1 per cent at retailers.

Lav Varshney, an assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, will lead a session on 'Blockchain and the Scientific Method' as a part of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) annual meeting in Washington D.C., on Feb. 15, 2019.

A new study in the INFORMS journal Marketing Science finds that the auto insurance industry's Usage-Based Insurance (UBI) approach, which uses on-board technology to report drivers' real time driving behavior, benefits both the motorist and the insurer.

By many estimates, only 5 percent of US patients are high-need, high-cost (HNHC), yet they account for about 50 percent of health care spending. It has become a national priority to understand the needs of this patient cohort, identify drivers of their utilization, and implement solutions to improve their clinical outcomes while reducing their costs.

Discovering that your new designer handbag or gold watch is a fake is costly and annoying, and counterfeit medical devices or drugs could have even more serious consequences. But seemingly as soon as manufacturers develop a new method to ensure product authenticity, counterfeiters find a way to outsmart it. Now, researchers have created an 'unclonable' tag that can never be replicated, even by the manufacturer. They report their results in ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces.

Hyperlinks slow down reading speed only when the linked word is unfamiliar, an effect that is independent of link color, according to new research published in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by Gemma Fitzsimmons, Mark Weal, and Dennis Drieghe of the University of Southampton in the UK. The effect is likely due to the reader's perception that the unfamiliar word may carry special importance in the sentence when formatted as a hyperlink.

As self-driving cars continue to develop, there will be plenty of data amassed through cars' navigational technologies. Questions regarding privacy, ownership, cybersecurity and public safety arise, as heavily guarded mapping data is collected and leveraged by companies. The geospatial data can be used to draw new maps identifying the spaces where we live and travel; yet, is currently housed in technological and corporate black boxes. These black boxes require greater transparency, according to a Dartmouth study posted in Cartographic Perspectives.

A four-year EU infrastructure project BBMRI-LPC analyzed the gaps and needs involved in the transnational access provision to large human research sample cohorts in Europe. The results show that there still are substantial obstacles for sample and data transfer in Europe.