Ofir Ben-Assuli

• PhD
• Lecturer at Ono Academic College

Background Healthcare facilities often encounter patients with incomplete records from previous visits, leading to duplicated tests. Recent Electronic Health Records (EHR) investments aim to address this issue. This study examines how viewing patient information via OFEK EHR affects the frequency of tests ordered by the physician. The OFEK system,...

Objectives: Metabolic syndrome (MetS) has a significant impact on health. MetS is the umbrella term for a group of interdependent metabolic threats that contribute to the emergence of diseases that can lead to death. This study was designed to better predict the risks associated with MetS to enable medical personnel to make more optimal preventive...

Electronic medical record (EMR) systems possess the potential to enable smart healthcare by serving as a hub for the transformation of medical data into meaningful information, knowledge, and wisdom in the health care sector [...]

Understanding patients' survival probability as well as the factors affecting it constitute a significant concern for researchers and practitioners, in particular for patients with severe chronic illnesses such as congestive heart failure (CHF). CHF is a clinical syndrome characterized by comorbidities and adverse medical events. Risk stratificatio...

The diffusion of an innovation is often discussed as the outcome of social processes. An alternative IT viewpoint is Adaptive Structuration Theory where IT as “appropriated” by an organization as enabling and encoding the “spirit” of that organization – why and how and where it does what it does. Examining such a case with the diffusion of an exist...

The objectives of the research were to analyze the association between Body Mass Index (BMI) and dental caries using novel approaches of both statistical and machine learning (ML) models while adjusting for cardiovascular risk factors and metabolic syndrome (MetS) components, consequences, and related conditions. This research is a data-driven anal...

Decision-makers in emergency settings need to employ the breadth of evidence available so as to inform critical judgments, yet the acute time pressure suggests that in some cases only partial information could be employed. Investigating this tension, the current study focuses on the usefulness of extraneous information that arrives from outside the...

Stratification modeling in health services is useful to identify differential patient risk groups, or latent classes. Given the frequency and costs, repeated emergency department (ED) may be an appropriate candidate for risk stratification modeling. We applied a method called group-based trajectory modeling (GBTM) to a sample of 37,416 patients who...

Introduction Diabetes is a chronic metabolic disease characterized by high levels of blood glucose, which can lead over time to severe impairment to the heart, blood vessels, eyes, kidneys, nerves and premature death. Diabetes is prone to complications such as kidney failure, vision loss and nerve damage. The total assessed cost of diagnosed diabet...

Non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD) affects 25% of the population worldwide, and its prevalence is anticipated to increase globally. While most NAFLD patients are asymptomatic, NAFLD may progress to fibrosis, cirrhosis, cardiovascular disease, and diabetes. Research reports, with daunting results, show the challenge that NAFLD's burden causes...

Congestive Heart Failure (CHF) is among the most prevalent chronic diseases worldwide, and is commonly associated with comorbidities and complex health conditions. Consequently, CHF patients are typically hospitalized frequently, and are at a high risk of premature death. Early detection of an envisaged patient disease trajectory is crucial for pre...

Purpose This narrative review surveys the literature on the Internet of Things (IoT) in healthcare, organising it according to dominant trends to provide instructive examples of how the IoT is used. It extends previous categorisations, providing an extensive framework for understanding IoT implementation in healthcare. It reflects on the nature of...

Objective: The objective of this paper is to provide empirical guidance by comparing the performance of six different area-level SDoH measurement approaches in predicting patient referral to a social worker and hospital admission after a primary care visit. Methods: We compared the performance of six area-level SDoH measurement approaches in predic...

Hospital readmission for chronic illness is a ubiquitous phenomenon that is a major contributor to the growing costs of the healthcare sector. Here, PRISMA was used to identify studies dealing with predicting readmissions for CHF and COPD patients that implemented machine learning techniques. The PRISMA output yielded 21 articles that met the inclu...

Non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD) is the most common liver disease worldwide, with a prevalence of 20%–30% in the general population. NAFLD is associated with increased risk of cardiovascular disease and may progress to cirrhosis with time. The purpose of this study was to predict the risks associated with NAFLD and advanced fibrosis on the...

Over the years, the public has paid growing attention to hospital-acquired infections (HAIs). Currently, infection prevention and control are considered a number one national priority in leading developed countries. However, while some hospital visitors are knowledgeable of the topic, others may be ignorant or careless as regards sterility and hygi...

Reducing costly hospital readmissions of patients with Congestive Heart Failure (CHF) is important. We analyzed 4,661 CHF patients (from 2007 to 2017) using Hidden Markov Models in order to profile CHF readmission risk over time. This method proved practical in identifying three patient groups with distinctive characteristics, which might guide phy...

Adalat (Nifedipine) is a calcium-channel blocker that is also used as an antihypertensive drug. The drug was approved by the US Food and Drug Administration in 1985 but was discontinued in 1996 on account, among other things, of interactions with other medications. Nonetheless, Adalat is still used in other countries to treat congestive heart failu...

Background: The issue of patient-physician relationships in general, and particularly the trust of patients in their primary care physician has gained much interest in academia and with practitioners in recent years. Most research on this important topic, however, focused on how patients view the relationship and not how the physicians see it. Thi...

Diagnostic complexity is an important contextual factor affecting a variety of medical outcomes. Existing measurements of diagnosis complexity either rely on crude proxies or use fine-grained measures that employ indicators from proprietary data that are not readily available. Hence, the study of this important construct in fields such as medical i...

Repeated emergency department visits have become a serious challenge worldwide. Despite prior research indicating that laboratory results may provide early alerts about such patients on their upcoming adverse events, few studies have examined their role as a critical indicator of the stability of a patient’s medical condition over time. We model an...

The potential impact of prediction methods is particularly relevant to emergency department (ED) settings which are characterized by complex and challenging conditions. Repeat ED visits are one such example of potential over-utilization over a longitudinal period that can in some cases be predicted. We tracked the ED revisit risk over time using a...

Background: The use of machine learning techniques is especially pertinent to the composite and challenging conditions of emergency departments (EDs). Repeat ED visits (i.e. revisits) are an example of potentially inappropriate utilization of resources that can be forecasted by these techniques. Objective: To track the ED revisit risk over time...

This study examines changes in the monthly penetration rates of a Health Information Exchange (HIE) in a large Health Maintenance Organisation (HMO) in Israel after its successful adoption, and how those rates changed in anticipation of a government policy to turn this HIE into a national system. Penetration rate is the proportion of patients whose...

Several indices exist to classify Congestive Heart Failure (CHF) patients' propensity for early mortality; however, they are primarily based on limited data and are not intuitive to use at the point of care. We investigate a novel, data-driven, risk assessment and visualization approach to investigate mortality prediction of CHF patients using data...

Introduction: Interoperable health information technologies, like electronic health records (EHR) and health information exchange (HIE), provide greater access to patient information from across multiple organizations. Also, an increasing number of public data sources exist to describe social determinant of health factors. These data may help bett...

Introduction and objectives: There are inconsistent findings on the association between human non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD) and vitamin D, perhaps due to insufficient specificity for gender and obesity status. We aimed to assess whether serum levels of 25-hydroxyvitamin D are associated with unexplained elevated alanine aminotransferas...

Background Big data analytics are becoming more prevalent due to the recent availability of health data. Yet in spite of evidence supporting the potential contribution of big data analytics to health policy makers and care providers, these tools are still too complex to be routinely used. Further, access to comprehensive datasets required for more...

Few studies have examined how to identify future readmission of patients with a large number of repeat emergency department (ED) visits. We explore 30-day readmission risk prediction using Microsoft’s AZURE machine learning software and compare five classification methods: Logistic Regression, Boosted Decision Trees (BDTs), Support Vector Machine (...

Few studies have examined how to identify future readmission of patients with a large number of repeat emergency department (ED) visits. We explore 30-day readmission risk prediction using Microsoft’s AZURE machine learning software and compare five classification methods: Logistic Regression, Boosted Decision Trees (BDTs), Support Vector Machine (...

Personal health records (PHR) have been endorsed as a promising tool for the self-management of an individual's medical information, affording benefits to both the individual patient and the healthcare system as a whole. Nevertheless, adoption rates have been relatively slow and widespread acceptance has yet to be achieved. A significant obstacle o...

Objective: Obesity is a worldwide problem that has been linked to serious medical issues. Obesity-related conditions drain healthcare expenditures globally, and in particular in the U.S. This article suggests methods to forecast future costs associated with obesity-related healthcare in the next two decades. Methods: An Auto Regressive Integrated M...

Analyzing who is likely to be readmitted and understanding some key factors contributing to preventable readmissions in hospitals is being widely researched, but few studies have examined the role of clinical disease markers in predicting frequent readmissions related to disease progression. In this study, we explore 7-day readmission risk predicti...

AIM To evaluate the bidirectional association between metabolic syndrome (MS) components and antiviral treatment response for chronic hepatitis C virus (HCV) infection. METHODS This retrospective cohort study included 119 HCV + patients treated with pegylated-interferon-α and ribavirin. Metabolic characteristics and laboratory data were collected...

In the last decade, health providers have implemented information systems to improve accuracy in medical diagnosis and decision-making. This article evaluates the impact of an electronic health record on emergency department physicians' diagnosis and admission decisions. A decision analytic approach using a decision tree was constructed to model th...

Objective: To review and present the relationship and need for integrating EMR, EHR and PHR data, by highlighting its use and value challenges and threats. Method: Critical overview of the literature. Results: Electronic Medical Records (EMR) and Electronic Health Records (EHR) are used by physicians to improve quality of care and contain costs. Wh...

Health care organizations have installed electronic systems to increase efficiency in health care. Empirically assessing the cost-effectiveness of technologies to the health care system is a challenging and complex task. This study examined cost-effectiveness of additional clinical information supplied via an EHR system by simulating a case of abdo...

We thank Drs. Ozcelik and Yiginer for providing additional plausible mechanistic pathways to explain the association between elevated uric acid and non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD), which was demonstrated in our epidemiological population-based study. The strength of our study is the utilization of epidemiological "real world data". Howeve...

Health information exchange HIE interoperable networks are rapidly becoming the preferred infrastructure for transferring medical data and information between healthcare organisations. This study explored whether the use of interoperable networks such as HIE that provide physicians with medical history affects the rate of ordering tests and using i...

Emergency department (ED) represents a distinctively challenging and critical work environment. While there is growing evidence for the positive role played by Electronic Health Record systems in hospitals, the evidence for their effectiveness in the ED setting has been inconclusive. The objective of this paper is to explore the moderating role pla...

The problem of readmission, wherein patients are readmitted for the same or a related condition shortly after discharge, has become a challenge worldwide from care quality and financial perspectives. In this study, we explore 30-day readmission data for predicting who is likely to be readmitted and understanding key factors contributing to preventa...

Elevated serum uric-acid levels reflect and also cause both oxidative stress and insulin resistance and are frequently observed in patients with the metabolic syndrome. A strong association exists between the metabolic syndrome and nonalcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD). Therefore, we aimed to test the association between uric-acid and elevated a...

It is widely believed that electronic health records (EHR) improve medical decision-making by enabling medical staff to access medical information stored in the system. It remains unclear, however, whether EHR indeed fulfills this claim under the severe time constraints of Emergency Departments (EDs). We assessed whether accessing EHR in an ED actu...

Many medical organizations have implemented electronic health record (EHR) and health information exchange (HIE) networks to improve medical decision-making. This study evaluated the contribution of EHR and HIE networks to physicians by investigating whether health information technology can lead to more efficient admission decisions by reducing re...

Following the information revolution, enormous numbers of companies and individuals transfer by messages via social networks and/or in companies' communication networks. These messages, however, are subject to modifications as they spread through the network. This study calculates the distortion of a message as it spreads in a social network, and c...

Recently, the healthcare sector has shown a growing interest in information technologies. Two popular health IT (HIT) products are the electronic health record (EHR) and health information exchange (HIE) networks. The introduction of these tools is believed to improve care, but has also raised some important questions and legal and privacy issues....

This study characterizes the information components associated with improved medical decision-making in the emergency room (ER). We looked at doctors' decisions to use or not to use information available to them on an electronic health record (EHR) and a Health Information Exchange (HIE) network, and tested for associations between their decision a...

Background: Modeling medical decision-making has attracted considerable attention over the years, and has become the topic of many investigations. Researchers have attempted to model this critical and extremely complex process from several different angles to enable hospital clinicians to engage in decision-making using empirical tools. Purpose: Th...

Health organizations are implementing health information technologies such as electronic health records (EHR), information systems (IS), and health information exchange (HIE) networks to improve decision-making. However, over the years, the healthcare environment has demonstrated numerous unsuccessful implementations of such technologies. One of th...

This study characterizes the data components that might improve the process of medical decision-making in an emergency department. The outcome measures was the decision to admit/discharge a patient to the hospital from emergency room with/without using an electronic health record (EHR) and Health Information Exchange (HIE) network. We found that us...

In recent years, the healthcare sector has invested heavily in medical information systems to improve decision making while reducing medical costs and integrating medical data from multiple sources. However, the overall contribution of this technology to the medical field remains controversial, especially in high-stress environments such as the eme...

Background - Many medical organizations have invested heavily in electronic health record (EHR) and health information exchange (HIE) information systems (IS) to improve medical decision-making and increase efficiency. Despite the potential interoperability advantages of such IS, physicians do not always immediately consult electronic health inform...

Medical organizations adopt electronic health record (EHR) and health information exchange (HIE) interoperable technologies in order to provide vital medical information needed for medical decision-making. The use of such interoperable information may lead to increased quality of care and reduced unnecessary costs. The goal of this study was to cha...

Purpose – Although very significant and applicable, there have been no formal justifications for the use of Monte-Carlo models and Markov chains in evaluating hospital admission decisions or concrete data supporting their use. For these reasons, this research was designed to provide a deeper understanding of these models. The purpose of this paper...

Background: A growing number of patients have been undergoing bariatric surgery in recent years. The role of adherence with regular dietician follow-up in successful long-term weight reduction has yet to be determined, and there are no studies characterizing the utilization of nutritional services after bariatric surgery. The objective of this stu...

Many medical organizations have deployed electronic medical record (EMR) information systems (IS) to improve medical decision-making and increase efficiency. Despite their advantages, however, EMR IS may make less of a contribution in the stressful environment of an emergency department (ED) that operates under tight time constraints. The high leve...

This paper evaluates the contribution of an electronic health records (EHR) system to efficient decision-making by physicians, and investigates whether these systems lead to more efficient medical care in emergency departments (ED). Log-files of patient visits and admissions were retrieved from an integrative EHR system that serves seven main hospi...

Social TV, which is created by television viewers commenting and communicating online about TV shows, has exploded as an industry in recent years. While the amount of user-generated content about TV shows is enormous and growing, little has been done to show how this data might have value for TV networks and advertisers. In this paper, we demonstra...

Estimating the contribution of DSS to financial consulting decision-making is attracting considerable interest in the fast-growing field of banking DSS. This study evaluated the perceived role of banking DSS in the decision-making of investment counselors. A questionnaire was submitted to 40 investment counselors to determine the comparative import...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the contribution of medical information systems (IS) to efficient use of information when diagnosing chest pain complaints with suspected acute myocardial infarction (AMI) as regards ordering of tests and accuracy of diagnosis. Design/methodology/approach – In total, 102 physicians were asked to d...

Many medical organizations have deployed electronic medical record (EMR) information systems (IS) to improve medical decision-making and increase efficiency. Despite their advantages, however, EMR IS may make less of a contribution in the stressful environment of an emergency department (ED) that operates under tight time constraints. The high leve...

Vast numbers of organizations and individuals communicate every day by sending messages over social networks. These messages, however, are subject to change as they propagate through the network. This paper calculates the distortion of a message as it propagates in a social network with a scale-free topology, and suggests a remedial process in whic...

The healthcare sector has been investing heavily in health information technologies (HIT), with the aim of improving decision-making through improved medical processes, reduced costs and integration of medical data. However, the overall contribution of HIT to the medical field is not obvious, especially, in high-stress environments such as the emer...

Information systems have been adopted in many fields including the healthcare industry. Indeed, keeping abreast of the advances of the technological age, many medical organizations have invested heavily in information technologies (IT), aiming at improving medical decision-making and increasing its efficiency. Despite their advantages, information...