Conectar
by Steffen Porwollik, Mahtab Jafari
Rhodiola rosea supplements have become popular in the U.S., with a $3.4 billion market and an annual growth of about 10% in sales in the past few years. While the health benefits of this plant have been evaluated in many scientific studies, the potential differences in quality of these botanical products on the U.S. market have not been studied in detail. Using reversed-phase ultra-performance liquid chromatography, we determined the concentrations of the biomarker molecules, rosavins and salidroside, in a small but representative sample of R. rosea dietary supplement products commercially available in the U.S. Concentrations of rosavins and salidroside ranged from 0.01% to 3.08% and 0.07% to 2.91%, respectively, including substantial aberrations from advertised biomarker amounts. One product showed an undisclosed likely addition of synthetic salidroside. We also assessed heavy metal contaminations via inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry and pesticide contents by gas chromatography-mass spectrometry or liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry in these botanical products. While pesticide levels were below detection limits, all seven tested capsular products had trace amounts of arsenic, cobalt, and lead. Two of these contained notably elevated levels of cobalt and arsenic, where follow-up arsenic speciation would be required to verify whether they remain within minimal risk levels established by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Overall, these results underscore the need for more stringent quality control in herbal supplements containing R. rosea available in the U.S.A dashboard was developed with and for Irish general practitioners (GPs) to improve their understanding of practice data. The aim of this study was to design and develop interactive CARA dashboards to enable Irish GPs to visualise patient data and compare their data with other practices.
An interpretivist qualitative approach was taken to create a deeper understanding of how GPs view and engage with data. It included four stages: (a) problem formulation, (b) building, intervention and evaluation, (c) reflection and learning and (d) formalisation of learning. The process included interviews to explore what type of information GPs need, as well as iterative testing of the CARA dashboard prototype.
General practice.
GPs, design experts and domain experts (antibiotic prescribing and stewardship).
Key challenges identified from the interviews (context, sense-making, audits, relevance, action, engagement and ease of use) formed the basis for developing the CARA dashboard prototype. The first exemplar dashboard focused on antibiotic prescribing to develop and showcase the proposed platform, including automated audit reports, filters (within-practice) and between-practice comparisons, as well as a visual overview of practice demographics. The design thinking approach helped to capture and build an understanding of the GPs’ perspectives and identify unmet needs. This approach benefits the quality improvement methodology commonly adopted across healthcare, which aims to understand the process, not the users.
The development of a useful dashboard is based on two key elements: users’ requirements and their continued involvement in the development of content and overall design decisions. The next step will be an incremental inclusion of GPs using the dashboard and an exploratory study on dashboard engagement. Additional dashboards, such as for chronic disease, will be developed.
FreshRSS 