Yuri Quintana

• Ph.D.
• Professor (Assistant) at Harvard Medical School

With an increasingly elderly population, families are finding it increasingly challenging to coordinate care for their older family members. This paper reports on the findings of InfoSAGE, an online private social network that has tools for communication and care coordination for elders and their families. The InfoSAGE system has 257 registered use...

This study evaluates mobile apps using a theory-based evaluation framework to discover their applicability for patients at risk of gestational diabetes. This study assessed how well the existing mobile apps on the market meet the information and tracking needs of patients with gestational diabetes and evaluated the feasibility of how to integrate t...

Global standardization of outcome measures for disease states can help researchers and healthcare providers compare healthcare institutions’ and populations' health outcomes. Despite the creation of standardized outcome sets, clinical institutions' adoption of these sets is not common. A literature review shows that among the challenges to standard...

Objectives: This paper describes a methodology for gathering requirements and early design of remote monitoring technology (RMT) for enhancing patient safety during pandemics using virtual care technologies. As pandemics such as COrona VIrus Disease (COVID-19) progress there is an increasing need for effective virtual care and RMT to support patien...

The COVID-19 pandemic has created multiple opportunities to deploy artificial intelligence (AI)-driven tools and applied interventions to understand, mitigate, and manage the pandemic and its consequences. The disproportionate impact of COVID-19 on racial/ethnic minority and socially disadvantaged populations underscores the need to anticipate and...

Background Integrating artificial intelligence (AI) in healthcare settings has the potential to benefit clinical decision-making. Addressing challenges such as ensuring trustworthiness, mitigating bias, and maintaining safety is paramount. The lack of established methodologies for pre- and post-deployment evaluation of AI tools regarding crucial at...

Introduction Traumatic brain injury (TBI) can impact language processing, necessitating language-tailored approaches. Telehealth may expand rural Veterans’ access but has unknown feasibility for language preferences. This study explored telehealth/Veterans Video Connect satisfaction for Spanish/English TBI screening. Materials and Methods The stud...

Objective The increasing demands for curated, high-quality research data are driving the emergence of a novel registry type. The need to assemble, curate, and export this data grows, and the conventional simplicity of registry models is driving the need for advanced, multimodal data registries—the dawn of the next-generation registry. Materials an...

Introduction Patient misunderstanding of instructions on medication labels is a common cause of medication errors and can result in ineffective treatment. One way to better improve patient comprehension of medication labels is by optimizing the content and display of the information. Objectives To review comparative studies that have evaluated the...

The COVID-19 pandemic has placed unprecedented strain on global health systems, and the ability to safely and effectively deliver care. Further, it has impacted the mental health of global populations, in particular healthcare providers (i.e., physicians, nurses). In a service delivery context, much can be learned about empathy both from a provider...

Cross-disciplinary approaches to remediate complex healthcare service delivery issues may have merit. This study aims to establish the potential benefits of applying service design and evaluative research concepts in healthcare. Specifically, this study aims to demonstrate how a Customer Journey Map and a Logic Model could be used in unison to iden...

The pandemic has had devastating impacts on humanity and the global healthcare sector. An analysis into the social determinants of health, in particular racial and ethnic disparities may explain why certain population groups have been disproportionately affected by COVID-19. The objective of this study is to humanize and personify numerical data. A...

Successful clinical trials offer better treatments to current or future patients and advance scientific research.1,2,3 Clinical trials define the target population using specific eligibility criteria to ensure an optimal enrollment sample.4 Clinical trial eligibility criteria are often described in unstructured free-text5 which makes automation of...

INTRODUCTION The Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association (JAMIA) focus issue on Global Health Informatics (GHI) examines how health informatics can address global health issues. The selected papers discuss how informatics can improve health outcomes, especially in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs). The articles in this issue...

Background: Journey maps are visualization tools that can facilitate the diagrammatical representation of stakeholder groups by interest or function for comparative visual analysis. Therefore, journey maps can illustrate intersections and relationships between organizations and consumers using products or services. We propose that some synergies m...

Background Risk Evaluation and Mitigation Strategy (REMS) programs intend to improve medication safety but can add significant administrative burdens to providers and health systems. Various stakeholders have made efforts to use technology to improve REMS programs. Objectives The objective of this scoping review is to describe studies evaluating wo...

BACKGROUND Journey maps are visualization tools that can facilitate the diagrammatical representation of stakeholder groups by interest or function for comparative visual analysis. Therefore, journey maps can illustrate intersections and relationships between organizations and consumers using products or services. We propose that some synergies may...

In the wake of COVID -19, several nations have sought to implement digital vaccine passports (DVPs) to enable the resumption of international travel. Comprising a minimum dataset for each unique individual, DVPs have the makings of a global electronic health record, broaching key issues involved in building a global digital health ecosystem. Debate...

Background: There is currently no system that aligns pharmaceutically equivalent medicinal products across nations, creating obstacles to transnational medication prescribing and medical research. EDQM has been internationally recognized as the leading system in systematic pharmaceutical product descriptions. RxNorm is a critical terminology based...

Natural Language Processing (NLP) has been adopted widely in clinical trial matching for its ability to process unstructured text that is often found in electronic health records. Despite the rise in the new tools that use NLP to match patients to eligible clinical trials, the comparison of these tools is difficult due to the lack of consistency in...

Patient experience while using telehealth services impacts patient care, and health system incentives and reimbursement. Therefore, the patient experience should be continuously improved, which requires evaluation. Surveying patients is integral to this process. Ideally, patient experience surveys used to evaluate telehealth services should cover p...

COVID-19 has been a devastating disease, especially in underserved communities. Data has shown that Indigenous peoples, Latinx communities, and Black Americans have a 3.3, 2.4, and 2 times higher mortality rate than White communities, respectively, due to COVID-19. Therefore, in this paper, we sought to understand how Social Determinants of Health...

This paper discusses a method to develop and validate telehealth surveys that include social determinants of health domains. We performed a scoping review of literature on measuring social determinants of health and extracted 50 social determinants of health domains. We evaluated 14 validated telehealth surveys for questions associated with social...

Actualizing the vision of Global Digital Health is a central issue on the Global Health Diplomacy agenda. The COVID-reinforced need for accelerated digital health progress will require political structures and processes to build a foundation for Global Digital Health. Simultaneously, Global Health Diplomacy uses digital technologies in its enactmen...

The significant increase in the number of individuals with chronic ailments (including the elderly and disabled) has dictated an urgent need for an innovative model for healthcare systems. The evolved model will be more personalized and less reliant on traditional brick-and-mortar healthcare institutions such as hospitals, nursing homes, and long-t...

The significant increase in the number of individuals with chronic ailments (including the elderly and disabled) has dictated an urgent need for an innovative model for healthcare systems. The evolved model will be more personalized and less reliant on traditional brick-and-mortar healthcare institutions such as hospitals, nursing homes, and long-t...

Global standardization of outcome measures for disease states can help researchers and healthcare providers compare healthcare institutions' and populations' health outcomes. Despite the creation of standardized outcome sets, clinical institutions' adoption of these sets is not common. A literature review shows that among the challenges to standard...

This paper summarizes the 2020 Diversity in Radiology and Molecular Imaging: What We Need to Know Conference, a three-day virtual conference held September 9–11, 2020. The World Molecular Imaging Society (WMIS) and Stanford University jointly organized this event to provide a forum for WMIS members and affiliates worldwide to openly discuss issues...

The COVID-19 pandemic has created multiple opportunities to implement Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies in new ways that address the initial infectious curve (e.g., triaging patients and disseminating information during disease outbreaks), as well as the subsequent curves of pandemic sequelae (managing gaps in care of chronic conditions, ad...

Aims Childhood cancer survival is suboptimal in most low- and middle-income countries (LMICs). Radiotherapy plays a significant role in the standard care of many patients. To assess the current status of paediatric radiotherapy, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) undertook a global survey and a review of practice in eight leading treatme...

This report provides an overview of published evidence pertaining to apps. The report indicates that at this stage, although there is some evidence related to the value of some apps, evaluations have been limited and incomplete. There is an urgent need for systematic, thorough, objective evaluation of apps to inform decisions about which apps are s...

This report represents a key step toward that goal. It presents a Framework that a) identifies critical issues that must be addressed in designing and evaluating apps, and b) outlines criteria and protocols for rigorously evaluating these issues to generate the evidence needed by those looking for credible apps. This type of Framework is novel and...

Background: Health research apps often do not focus on usability as a design priority. This is problematic when the population of interest is disproportionately underrepresented as users of mobile apps, especially observed with aging older adults (> = 75). Challenges with the adoption of health information technology (HIT) among this group are exa...

Most cases of maternal deaths could be avoided with timely access to quality healthcare, but a key challenge in addressing quality of care in maternal health is the lack of accurate data and analytics. Implementing online communities of practice is a way to resolve this, but in low-and middle-income countries this is particularly challenging. We di...

Globally, there is an expanding elderly population, and families are finding it increasingly challenging to coordinate care for their older family members. This paper reports on the usage patterns of InfoSAGE, an online private social network that has tools for communication and care coordination for elders and their families. This descriptive anal...

Although prostate cancer is the leading cause of cancer mortality for African men, the vast majority of known disease associations have been detected in European study cohorts. Furthermore, most genome-wide association studies have used genotyping arrays that are hindered by SNP ascertainment bias. To overcome these disparities in genomic medicine,...

The design of a mobile medication manager within a broader family and elder-centric collaboration platform faces challenges of usability and wide applicability. To inform the development and use cases of eldercare apps, we present the preliminary results of a usability study of an iOS and Android app intended for both family members and aging adult...

Most cases of maternal deaths could be avoided with timely access to quality healthcare, but a key challenge in addressing quality of care in maternal health, is the lack of accurate data. We present a review of the difficulties of collecting and analyzing maternal health data. We propose a comprehensive informatics monitoring framework to track pr...

Background Longevity creates increasing care needs for healthcare providers and family caregivers. Increasingly, the burden of care falls to one primary caregiver, increasing stress and reducing health outcomes. Additionally, little has been published on adults’, over the age of 75, preferences in the development of health information sharing with...

Purpose: Health research in low- and middle-income countries can generate novel scientific knowledge and improve clinical care, fostering population health improvements to prevent premature death. Project management is a critical part of the success of this research, applying knowledge, skills, tools, and techniques to accomplish required goals. H...

Purpose: Cancer of the prostate (CaP) is the leading cancer among men in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). A substantial proportion of these men with CaP are diagnosed at late (usually incurable) stages, yet little is known about the etiology of CaP in SSA. Methods: We established the Men of African Descent and Carcinoma of the Prostate Network, which i...

Objective Adherence to antiretroviral therapy (ART) is paramount to successful long-term suppression of human immunodeficiency virus (HIV). For poorly adherent patients with HIV, barriers to remaining adherent may be overcome by the implementation of targeted interventions delivered via mobile devices. This systematic review is focused specifically...

Available as of Augst 3, 2017 http://www.springer.com/us/book/9783319517315 A major challenge in global health is improving newborn and maternal health. A variety of economic, geopolitical, socio-cultural, and technical factors are involved. Online and mobile technologies hold the potential to improve maternal and newborn health by supporting acce...

Available at http://www.gedisa.com/ficha.aspx?cod=500456&titulo=Serious-Games-for-Health#.WQc_h8m1sUE Los juegos aplicados en salud educan, entretienen y favorecen un mejor acceso de los usuarios al mundo sanitario en todas sus vertientes. Además, para este sector suponen una oportunidad sin precedentes en lo relativo a la motivación y el cambio de...

Aging creates new information and communication needs for families who are helping to coordinate care for frail parents. To identify how information and communication needs evolve with the aging process, we created a living laboratory of families, supported by an online private social network with tools for care coordination. Site registrants are i...

Available at https://www.elsevier.com/books/global-health-informatics/marin/978-0-12-804591-6 Global Health Informatics is a growing multidisciplinary field that combines research methods and applications of technology to improve healthcare systems and outcomes. Healthcare systems are facing many challenges including a growing population, the incr...

In 2006, St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital (Memphis, Tennessee) began developing a school-based outreach program known as the St. Jude Cancer Education for Children Program (SJCECP). The aim of this program is to teach Memphis-area children about cells, cancer, and healthy habits that can prevent the development of cancer in adulthood. Initial...

Translational Collaboration Platforms connect clinical, genomics, and patient-reported data for the advancement of biomedical research, providing an opportunity to speed up the translating of basic science findings into clinical applications and new medicines. These platforms bring together data from both clinical and research databases and provide...

Delivering health care to a growing world population and to communities in underserved areas is a major global health challenge. Over the last few decades, many approaches have been developed under various frameworks such as telemedicine, telehealth, eHealth, and mhealth. This chapter reviews the evolution of these networks for coordination of pati...

People-centered health care seeks an active role for the patient while empowering all other members of the health care team. By promoting greater patient responsibility and optimal usage, patient-centered health care leads to improved health outcomes , quality of life and optimal value for health care investment. This paper reviews some definitions...

Over half the deaths from disease in the world are now due to just four chronic conditions – diabetes, lung diseases, some cancers and heart disease. Health and education are inextricably linked. Developing and delivering effective, scalable and sustainable education programs which lead to real behavioral change would influence some of the common r...

Purpose: Pediatric cancer represents 1% to 4% of all cancers worldwide, with the majority of diagnoses in developing countries where mortality remains much higher than that in high-income countries. We sought to describe differences in ethical decision-making at the end of life among an international sample of pediatric oncologists practicing in c...

The agility literature suggests a positive relationship between IT-investments, agility, and performance for firms operating in turbulent contexts. However, agility studies have primarily focused on conceptual concerns, leaving these relationships empirically unexplored. In addition, the literature has focused on for-profit firms operating in comme...

The Pediatric Oncology Network Database, (www.pond4kids.org, POND), is a secure, web-based, multilingual pediatric hematology/oncology database created for use in countries with limited resources to meet various clinical data management needs including cancer registration, delivery of protocol-based care, outcome evaluation, and assessment of psych...

Non-communicable diseases, such as cancer, diabetes, and chronic cardiovascular and respiratory diseases, remain a major cause of mortality and morbidity worldwide resulting in more than 36 million deaths annually. Of primary importance in the reduction of this pain and suffering is the local use of education to eliminate misconception, enable prev...

Since 2006 St. Jude Children's Research Hospital has been developing Cure4Kids for Kids, a school-based outreach program to educate children about cancer and healthy lifestyles with a focus on cancer prevention. An evaluation of student knowledge acquisition and retention for the program at the Grade-4 level was conducted during the 2010-2011 schoo...

In 2006, St. Jude Children's Research Hospital created Cure4Kids for Kids, a school-based outreach program. The objectives of this community education program are to teach about cancer and healthy lifestyles and to inspire an interest in science and health-related careers. A multidisciplinary team of St. Jude and outside experts developed and pilot...

Full text available at http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/pbc.24071/epdf Accurate diagnosis is critical for optimal management of pediatric cancer. Pathologists with experience in pediatric oncology are in short supply in the developing world. Telepathology is increasingly used for consultations but its overall contribution to diagnostic a...

Objective: In developed countries, pharmacists play a crucial role in designing and implementing cancer treatments as part of a multidisciplinary oncology team. However, developing countries have a shortage of pharmacists, and their role is generally limited to dispensing and selling drugs. The aim of this study was to investigate the feasibility o...

Background: The St. Jude Cure4Kids program provides online continuing medical education and collaboration tools to thousands of healthcare professionals worldwide. With a focus on pediatric cancer, Cure4Kids (www.Cure4Kids.org) presents content in the form of online seminars, courses, electronic full-text books and journals, and interactive case di...

In developed countries, pharmacists play a crucial role in designing and implementing cancer treatments as part of a multidisciplinary oncology team. However, developing countries have a shortage of pharmacists, and their role is generally limited to dispensing and selling drugs. The aim of this study was to investigate the feasibility of providing...

Purpose: Online learning is a wealthy resource for educating pediatric oncology nurses who lack access to specialized education in the face-to-face realm due to time and/or financial constraints. The purpose of this project was to develop the nursing section of Oncopedia, a pediatric oncology resource that uses a combination of interactive e-public...

Professional infection preventionists are essential for effective infection prevention and control programs. These professionals require competencies in the areas of surveillance, data management, targeted interventions for healthcare-associated infections (HAI), and measurement of outcomes. However, countries with limited resources like those in L...

Information about pediatric survivors of brain tumors in developing countries is scant. In this study, we aimed to investigate the availability of resources for treatment and long-term follow-up of children with central nervous system tumors in developing countries. A web-based questionnaire on available services and follow-up of brain tumor surviv...

People-centered health care systems aim to empower people with their health care decisions, make information more accessible, and enable more autonomy [1-12]. The goal is to promote well-being as much as to treat disease, and to create more collaboration between providers, patients, and their families, thus reducing costs and improving health outco...

The Pediatric Oncology Network Database, POND4Kids (www.pond4kids.org, POND), is an online, multilingual clinical database created for use by pediatric oncology units in countries with limited resources to meet various clinical data management needs including cancer registration, data collection and changes in treatment outcome. Established as a pa...

We assessed the availability and quality of palliative care for children with cancer according to national income per capita. We surveyed physicians who care for children with cancer using the Cure4Kids website (http://www.cure4kids.org). Queries addressed oncology practice site; reimbursement; specialised palliative care, pain management and berea...

This article describes the development and editing of Oncopedia, a source of information on pediatric oncology that combines interactive collaborative e-publication with traditional peer-reviewed models. Oncopedia is a product of the International Outreach Program at St Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis, Tennessee. Full text available a...

The Cure4Kids Website (www.Cure4Kids.org) brings the latest medical knowledge and continuing education on the treatment of pediatric catastrophic diseases to thousands of health care providers worldwide. The website offers a digital library, on-demand seminars with slides and audio in several languages, and online meeting rooms for international co...

Global studies of childhood cancer provide clues to cancer etiology, facilitate prevention and early diagnosis, identify biologic differences, improve survival rates in low-income countries (LIC) by facilitating quality improvement initiatives, and improve outcomes in high-income countries (HIC) through studies of tumor biology and collaborative cl...

Pediatric cancer units in low-income countries lack data on which to base quality improvement initiatives. We implemented a data management program in the oncology unit of the children's hospital of Tegucigalpa, Honduras, and then we assessed training and supervision of data managers, data accuracy, and completeness as well as obstacles encountered...

In developing countries, continuing education for healthcare staff may be limited by staff shortages and lack of sophisticated means of delivery. These limitations have implications for compliance with an important infection control practice, namely good hand hygiene. A comparison was made between the efficacy of two educational tools commonly used...

ISSUE: Infections are an important problem in hospitalized children in developing countries. Although awareness of infection control can be achieved by providing healthcare providers with education, this may be limited by staff shortages and a lack of trained educators. PROJECT: We used online communication via www.Cure4Kids.org to train infection...

The Pediatric Oncology Networked Database (POND4Kids) is an online, multilingual database for pediatric hematology/oncology patients. Its purpose is to improve the care of pediatric oncology patients in countries with limited resources by the exchange of information and experience between oncologists in diverse geographic regions who practice in a...

This poster describes the open source medical system architecture and approaches for data sharing and interoperability.

The International Outreach Program of St. Jude Childrens' Research Hospital has been developing programs to help countries with limited resources develop treatment centers to treat children with catastrophic diseases such as pediatric cancer and AIDS. Cure4Kids (www.cure4kids.org) is the Internet learning network that delivers medical education to...

To explore how best to make high-quality preventive health information available to consumers on the Internet. Focus groups. Three urban workplaces and one local hospital with patients from a rural family medical practice. Twenty-two men and 17 women patients. Qualitative survey of four focus groups, analysis of transcripts and researchers' notes....

To explore family physicians' perspectives on how best to provide evidence-based preventive clinical practice guidelines (CPGs) to physicians on the Internet. Focus groups. A large, urban centre and a rural community hospital. Thirty-four of more than 150 family physicians who subscribed to an e-mail discussion group. Qualitative survey of four foc...

This paper describes an intelligent information filtering system to assist users to be notified of updates to new and relevant medical information. Among the major problems users face is the large volume of medical information that is generated each day, and the need to filter and retrieve relevant information. The Internet has dramatically increas...

This paper describes an information filtering system that creates personalized web pages with new and relevant information for users. The system maintains a model of each user based on web pages visited and relevance rankings made of those pages made by the user. The system has been used with a consumer health information web site. Focus interviews...

The paper describes an empirical study conducted to determine which features are significant to humans for clustering and information retrieval algorithms. New methods for comparing sets of clusters created by both humans and machine are described. The results of these experiments are then used to make recommendations for the design of conceptual c...

A picture knowledge base management system is described that is used to represent, organize and retrieve pictures from a frame knowledge base. Experiments with human test subjects were conducted to obtain further descriptions of pictures from news magazines. These descriptions were used to represent the semantic content of pictures in frame represe...

This paper describes a knowledge based ap- proach to organizing and retrieving pictures. Methods are described for using the human per- ceptions of pictures to create a frame knowl- edge base that represents the semantic content of pictures. A pictorial knowledge base man- agement system is described that uses a con- ceptual clustering algorithm to...

An object-oriented database is described that can be used to create multimedia compound documents. Each document represents a news story and consists of objects of text, sound, audio, and video that can be added and modified by multiple authors. Each object has revision control information that allows editors to assemble multimedia news as it arriv...

Methods are described for using human perceptions of pictures to represent the semantic content of these pictures in frame knowledge bases. A pictorial knowledge base management system is presented that uses a conceptual clustering algorithm for organizing a frame knowledge base into groups of semantically similar pictures. The conceptual clusterin...

Current hypertext systems have no intelligent means for finding specific information. When searching for specific information (as opposed to browsing), users can get disoriented in large hypertext documents and may end up following a path that takefs them farther away from the information they seek. This paper describes an information retrieval sys...

Objective: To explore family physicians' perspectives of how best to provide evidence-based preventive clinical practice guidelines to physicians on the Internet. Design: Qualitative focus groups. Method, Setting & Participants: Four focus groups were conducted with family physicians-three in a large urban centre, and one in a rural community hospi...

Objective: To explore how best to make high quality preventive health information available to consumers on the Internet in usable formats. Design: Qualitative focus groups. Method, Setting & Participants: Four focus groups were conducted-three at urban workplaces and one at a local hospital with patients from a rural family medical practice. There...