Herman Tolentino

ABSTRACT: https://programme.aids2024.org/Abstract/Abstract/?abstractid=5859 BACKGROUND: Climate change presents significant threats such as sea-level rise, impacting vulnerable coastal cities and healthcare facilities within the PEPFAR portfolio. By 2030, the year targeted for achieving UNAIDS 95-95-95 goals, significant flooding due to sea-level...

Introduction the Growing Expertise in E-health Knowledge and Skills (GEEKS) program is an applied apprenticeship program that aims to improve informatics capacity at various levels of the national health system and create a sustainable informatics workforce. Nigeria adapted the GEEKS model in 2019 as a mechanism to strengthen data quality and use o...

Background Aggregate electronic data repositories and population-level cross-sectional surveys play a critical role in HIV programme monitoring and surveillance for data-driven decision-making. However, these data sources have inherent limitations including inability to respond to public health priorities in real-time and to longitudinally follow u...

The aim of universal health coverage (UHC) is to ensure that all individuals in a country have access to quality healthcare services and do not suffer financial hardship in using these services. However, progress toward attaining UHC has been slow, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa. The use of information and communication technologies for healthc...

Background Electronic health information systems (HIS) are critical components of national health systems, and have been identified as a key element in the development and strengthening of health systems globally. Novel approaches are needed to effectively and efficiently train health care workers on the use of HIS. One such approach is the use of...

The public health landscape is undergoing profound changes, including rapid advances in technology, increasing use of electronic health records, and health reform. Improving population health requires knowledge and skills in managing and working within the adaptive complexity of underlying societal structures and functions. These advances in techno...

Evaluation is the application of specific criteria to determine the value or merit of the object of the study. Ensuring that public health information systems (ISs) and programs are managed wisely is essential. Evaluation answers the question of “why” a system is necessary, by collecting the data and performing the analysis needed to make determina...

The pervasiveness of mobile technology, coupled with improving the performance of the devices and decreasing cost, presents a new option for conducting infectious disease surveillance. Wireless devices are also attractive to surveillance because they combine telephony with such features as navigation and location-based services, touch-based user in...

This chapter provides an introduction to the pedagogy of using the case method particularly for instruction in the health informatics context. The thoughts and insights shared in this chapter are inspired by basic theories, published methods, and lessons learned from the authors’ collective experiences. They illustrate the case teaching experience...

The medical and public health benefits of the investment in HIT cannot be achieved without the optimal adoption of electronic medical records and the implementation of Health Information Exchanges (HIE). While Health Information Exchanges generate value to various stakeholder, the implementation of sustainable HIEs is a major challenge facing most...

The onrush of information technology into the clinical areas of healthcare is creating opportunities for public health practitioners to take advantage of health information technology (HIT). The efforts of the federal government in funding HIT adoption in the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health (HITECH) provision of the A...

This chapter describes the current and future needs for the public health workforce in order for us to continue to do effective public health surveillance outlined in the preceding chapters. It emphasizes the need to monitor the skills of the workforce and ensure they match the evolving needs of the field of public health surveillance. It provides...

Free or low-cost sources of unstructured information, such as Internet news and online discussion sites, provide detailed local and near real-time data on disease outbreaks, even in countries that lack traditional public health surveillance. To improve public health surveillance and, ultimately, interventions, we examined 3 primary systems that pro...

The 'One Laptop per Child' or XO computer was developed as an education tool for children in developing countries around the world. We wanted to know whether it could also be used to access knowledge sources at the NLM formatted for low bandwidth environments. We report on our experience in using the OLPC computer as a gateway to NLM databases (MED...

Open-source applications belong to a genre of software with unique intellectual property implications and that promote free use, modification and redistribution of source code. It has made significant inroads in the global IT industry and in health care as well. Public health practice, research and learning are information-intensive fields and requ...

Understanding the completeness and accuracy of U.S. military anthrax vaccination data is important to the design and interpretation of studies to assess the safety of anthrax vaccine. We estimated the agreement between electronically recorded anthrax vaccination data in the Defense Medical Surveillance System (DMSS) versus anthrax vaccination data...

Raw data. Contains text files used for training and evaluation of algorithms

Source code. Software platform used to launch modules for spell checker

Graphviz application directory. Sets up the graphviz application directory for storing outputs of graphing application

Database tables – UMLS Lexicon Part 1. Database tables have been subdivided into smaller files for uploading to BMC

Images application directory. Sets up directory for storing images related to software platform

Tables. Document contains tables: column descriptions of the custom dictionary, mean contribution of algorithms to word list generation, mean contribution of algorithms to word sense disambiguation (smoothing) and ranking, and spell checker performance measures.

README text file. Instructions for setting up the database and application

Index file for software platform. Index file for software platform

JPGRAPH application directory. Sets up JPGRAPH directory and source code used to draw graphs for software platform

RAP application directory. Sets up directory for RAP (RDF application for PHP) source code

Wordnet database tables. Database tables have been subdivided into smaller files for uploading to BMC

Database tables – UMLS Lexicon Part 2. Database tables have been subdivided into smaller files for uploading to BMC

MEDPOST directory. Sets up MEDPOST part-of-speech tagger and related files

Database tables – NLP1. Database tables have been subdivided into smaller files for uploading to BMC

Database tables – NLP2. Database tables have been subdivided into smaller files for uploading to BMC

OWL application directory. Sets up directory for storing OWL (Ontology Web Language) files

Database tables – UMLS Semantic Network. Database tables have been subdivided into smaller files for uploading to BMC

TEXDIFF application directory. Sets up directory for TEXTDIFF (highlights difference between two texts) source code

The Institute of Medicine has identified patient safety as a key goal for health care in the United States. Detecting vaccine adverse events is an important public health activity that contributes to patient safety. Reports about adverse events following immunization (AEFI) from surveillance systems contain free-text components that can be analyzed...

Geographic Information Systems (GIS) are useful for visual analysis and sharing of spatial data. Open standards like Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) provide viable alternatives to overcome traditional GIS limitations in resource-constrained settings (low-bandwidth, cost and manpower barriers). This project describes the design and implementation of...

Large amounts of information are locked up in free text components of clinical reports. Surveillance systems that monitor adverse events following immunizations (AEFI) can utilize these components after concept extraction using natural language processing (NLP). Specifically, our method for the identification and filtering of negated concepts using...

We developed a text messaging system for processing incoming Short Message Service (SMS) queries, retrieving medical journal citations from MEDLINE/PubMed and sending them back to the user in the text message format. A database of medical terminology abbreviations and acronyms was developed to reduce the size of text in journal citations and abstra...

Geographic Information Systems (GIS) are powerful communication tools for public health. However, using GIS requires considerable skill and, for this reason, is sometimes limited to experts. Web-based GIS has emerged as a solution to allow a wider audience to have access to geospatial information. Unfortunately the cost of implementing proprietary...

Community-based primary care information systems are one of the building blocks for national health information systems. In the Philippines, after the devolution of health care to local governments, we observed "health information system islands" connected to national vertical programs being implemented in devolved health units. These structures le...

Creation of an ontology for Adverse Events Following Immunization (AEFI) can help immunization stakeholders better understand adverse events. Moreover, it enables the sharing and reuse of machine-readable knowledge and enhances surveillance systems. Linkage of this knowledge base to controlled vocabularies establishes the foundation for integration...

Community-based primary care information systems are one of the building blocks for national health information systems. In the Philippines, after the devolution of health care to local governments, we observed "health information system islands" connected to national vertical programs being implemented in devolved health units. These structures le...

The development of the community-based health information systems is a constant challenge for any national health system wishing to implement information technology in healthcare. The challenge is further heightened by the high failure rate of 70 to 80 per cent in information systems projects. The development of a community-based child injury surve...

A peer-to-peer network of Critically Appraised Topics or CATs would allow sharing of relevant clinical information regarding specific clinical problems among physicians. This proposed network would enable clinicians to develop and share CATs to other users within the network. This poster describes a proposed implementation of a peer-to-peer interne...