QUALITY ASSESSMENT

Jul 11 2025HEALTH

Why Medical Device Studies Need a Quality Check

Medical devices are tricky. They're not like drugs. They have learning curves, affect how hospitals work, and their prices change over time. Plus, there's often not much data on them. This makes it hard to figure out if they're worth the money. People study these things to help decide where to spend healthcare dollars. But these studies aren't always great. They mig...

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Jun 01 2025SCIENCE

Smart Mapping: A New Way to Check Research Quality

Why is checking research quality important? It helps us trust the findings. This is especially true in fields like health geography and spatial epidemiology. These fields study how places affect health. To make sure the research is solid, experts created a new tool. It is called SMART, which stands for Spatial Methodology Appraisal of Research Tool. This tool has 16 ...

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May 27 2025HEALTH

Health Apps: Why Aren't More People Using Them?

Health apps are everywhere. There are over 350, 000 of them available. Yet, many people are hesitant to use them. Why is that? One big reason is trust. People worry about whether these apps are safe and effective. They also have concerns about data privacy. These worries are real and need to be addressed. One way to build trust is through quality assessments. These ...

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Apr 18 2025HEALTH

Challenges in Accessing Migraine Treatment Info Online

There is a big problem with the information available online about treating chronic migraines. It is often too hard to understand. This is a big issue because it makes it difficult for people to make informed decisions about their health. The average reading level of the information is at a 10th-grade level. This is much higher than the recommended 6th-grade leve...

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Apr 10 2025HEALTH

How Good Are Our Pregnancy Care Rules?

The goal was to check how good and useful current pregnancy care rules are. These rules are meant to help countries use or change them as needed. A thorough search was done in a big database for rules made with a system called GRADE. This system is used to create health guidelines. The rules found were about pregnancy care. They were then checked using a special tool...

reading time about 2 minutes
Mar 22 2025HEALTH

Unlocking the Power of Urinary Tests in China

China has been on a mission to improve the diagnosis of inherited metabolic disorders (IMDs) in newborns. The focus has been on urinary organic acid analysis. This type of testing is vital for spotting these disorders early. A five-year plan was put into action to standardize how these tests are done across the country. The plan started in 2019 and wra...

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Dec 03 2024HEALTH

Exploring Cognitive Interviews: Do Outcome Measures for Older Adults Hit the Mark?

Older adults, especially those over 65, are major users of healthcare and social services. Surprisingly, many tools designed to assess quality and economic impact haven't been properly tested with this age group. Enter cognitive interviews – a crucial method for validating these tools. This review looked at how cognitive interviews are used with older adults, includi...

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