The U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) awarded us an exploratory research (​EAGER) grant for In-Home Monitoring in Support of Caregivers for Patients with Dementia​. The investigator team is:

• Dr. Russ Waitman, Principal Investigator, is Director of Biomedical Informatics at KU Medical Center.
• Dr. Kristine Williams, Co-Investigator, is Associate Professor of Nursing and Associate Scientist of Gerontology at the University of Kansas.
• Dr. James Sterbenz, Co-Investigator, is the lead PI of an NSF GENI project: The Great Plains Environment for Network Innovation (​GpENI).

This project develops, integrates, and tests advanced video and networking technologies to support family caregivers in managing behavioral symptoms of individuals with dementia, a growing public health problem that adds to caregiver stress, increases morbidity and mortality, and accelerates nursing home placement. The project builds upon a recent University of Kansas Medical Center (KUMC) clinical pilot study that tested the application of video monitoring in the home to support family caregivers of persons with Alzheimer’s disease who exhibited disruptive behaviors. The proposed project focuses on expanding the in-home technological tools available to strengthen the linkage between patients and caregivers with their healthcare team via multi-camera full-motion/high definition video monitoring. Google’s deployment this year of a 1 Gpbs fiber network throughout Kansas City provides the ideal environment for measuring the impact that ultra-high speed networking will have on health care.

In a ​January NSF press release, the National Science Foundation (NSF) "announced that it will serve as the lead federal agency for a White House Initiative called US Ignite, which aims to realize the potential of fast, open, next-generation networks."

Our new connection with ​US Ignite provides access to resources in that community such as ​Mozilla Ignite and the ​GENI network lab. If you'd like to get involved, email Dan Connolly and Russ Waitman.

Searching with the Medical Administration Record (MAR) concepts limit your search to only medication administered in a specific way. For example, you can search for bolus in a bag or exclude medications denied. Diagnosis modifiers allow you to specify whether to search electronic medical record(O2), billing (IDX), or quality measures (UHC) diagnosis data. Both types of modifiers offer you the flexibility to narrow your search criteria when desired thus increasing the precision of search results.

HERON Waconda Contents Summary

This month, our tour of ​rivers and lakes in Kansas honors Waconda Lake.

The HERON repository contains approximately 816 million real observations from the hospital, clinics, and research systems:

Notice

Some material in the ​UMLS Metathesaurus is from copyrighted sources of the respective copyright holders. Users of the UMLS Metathesaurus are solely responsible for compliance with any copyright, patent or trademark restrictions and are referred to the copyright, patent or trademark notices appearing in the original sources, all of which are hereby incorporated by reference.

Beta Disclaimer

We are providing this early access to obtain feedback from you, the research community. While we are actively working on validating the data loaded into the system with hospital and clinic technical staff, there may be problems with our translation of data from our source systems (HospitalEpicSource and ClinicIdxSource) into HERON.

Please email us at heron-admin@kumc.edu if you discover information you believe may be erroneous.

We are actively working on enhancing the types of data included. Stay tuned to our roadmap to track progress toward upcoming releases.

Various Issues Still Apply

Keep in mind the issues noted in the original HERON beta notice, including:

• date shifting, part of our DeIdentificationStrategy
• age searching (#158)

Enhancements and Problems/Defects/Issues Addressed in this Release

Outstanding Problems/Defects/Issues