OBJECTIVES: We report on findings from a meeting convened by the American College of Medical Informatics (ACMI) to characterize aspects of the patient experience that could be improved using informatics. MATERIALS AND METHODS: The American College of Medical Informatics fellows were invited to share their experiences as patients and suggest informatics approaches that may improve the patient experience. RESULTS: We identified 4 themes: (1) getting the right care, (2) data sharing and data interoperability, (3) guiding low-cost evaluations, and (4) predictive analytics. DISCUSSION: Despite widespread adoption of health IT, patient experiences remain far from optimal. CONCLUSION: The American College of Medical Informatics fellows identified informatics approaches, applications, and research areas that have the potential to improve patient experiences with health care systems.

Many modification tasks on an existing software system result in changes to code that crosscuts the system's structure. Making these changes is difficult because a developer must understand large parts of the system, and must reason about how the modification will interact with the existing behaviour. Typically, developers make these kinds of changes using an ad-hoc approach with tools that help in gaining some understanding of the existing system, but that do not provide any specific support for reasoning about, implementing, or analyzing just that part of the system related to the modification. We present the behavioural concern modelling (BCM) approach and tool that provide direct support for a systematic approach to modification tasks. This approach enables a developer to create a partial, abstract, grounded behavioural model of a concern(s). By grounded, we mean that the relationship between the model and the code is explicit: A developer describes which code contributes to which parts of the model. The examples we describe use a finite state machine as a model. We show how the approach can help a developer capture a concern, reason about design options, and implement modifications.

Most software systems are inflexible. Reconfiguring a system's modules to add or to delete a feature requires substantial effort. This inflexibility increases the costs of building variants of a system, amongst other problems. New languages and tools that are being developed to provide additional support for separating concerns show promise to help address this problem. However applying these mechanisms requires determining how to enable a feature to be separated from the codebase. We investigate this problem through an exploratory study conducted in the context of two existing systems: gnu.regexp and jFTPd. The study consisted of applying three different separation of concern mechanisms: Hyper/J/sup TM/ AspectJ/sup TM/ and a lightweight, lexically-based approach, to separate features in the two packages. We report on the study, providing contributions in two areas. First, we characterize the effect different mechanisms had on the structure of the codebase. Second, we characterize the restructuring process required to perform the separations. These characterizations can help researchers to elucidate how the mechanisms may be best used, tool developers to design support to aid the separation process, and early adopters to apply the techniques.

A simple diversely polarized antenna geolocation scheme is herein proposed to upgrade older base-stations' nonadaptive antenna arrays to geolocate approximately mobile users and to perform downlink beamforming. Instead of retrofitting each antenna at an existing base-station with a separate temporal RAKE receiver, this simple technology needs only two horizontally oriented and magnetically small loops (plus an optional vertically oriented dipole), each with one temporal RAKE receiver. The diversely polarized system at the receiver matches the polarization of the handset transmitter's strong vertical electric-field; and novel geolocation algorithms are herein proposed for use with these collocated loops/dipole antenna systems. The estimated approximate azimuth angle of the mobile user then facilitates downlink transmission beamforming at the base-station.