Query: Ten Simple Rules for Developing Usable Software in Computational Biology

Relevant passages:
The Usability of Open Source Software <=SEP=> Twidale Open source communities have successfully developed a great deal of software although most computer users only use proprietary applications. The usability of open source software is often regarded as one reason for this limited distribution. In this paper we review the existing evidence of the usability of open source software and discuss how the characteristics of open source development influence usability. We describe how existing human-computer interaction techniques can be used to leverage distributed networked communities, of developers and users, to address issues of usability.

Detecting adversarial advertisements in the wild <=SEP=> In a large online advertising system, adversaries may attempt to profit from the creation of low quality or harmful advertisements. In this paper, we present a large scale data mining effort that detects and blocks such adversarial advertisements for the benefit and safety of our users. Because both false positives and false negatives have high cost, our deployed system uses a tiered strategy combining automated and semi-automated methods to ensure reliable classification. We also employ strategies to address the challenges of learning from highly skewed data at scale, allocating the effort of human experts, leveraging domain expert knowledge, and independently assessing the effectiveness of our system.

Social coding in GitHub: transparency and collaboration in an open software repository <=SEP=> Social applications on the web let users track and follow the activities of a large number of others regardless of location or affiliation. There is a potential for this transparency to radically improve collaboration and learning in complex knowledge-based activities. Based on a series of in-depth interviews with central and peripheral GitHub users, we examined the value of transparency for large-scale distributed collaborations and communities of practice. We find that people make a surprisingly rich set of social inferences from the networked activity information in GitHub, such as inferring someone else's technical goals and vision when they edit code, or guessing which of several similar projects has the best chance of thriving in the long term. Users combine these inferences into effective strategies for coordinating work, advancing technical skills and managing their reputation.

Searching for build debt: Experiences managing technical debt at Google <=SEP=> With a large and rapidly changing codebase, Google software engineers are constantly paying interest on various forms of technical debt. Google engineers also make efforts to pay down that debt, whether through special Fixit days, or via dedicated teams, variously known as janitors, cultivators, or demolition experts. We describe several related efforts to measure and pay down technical debt found in Google's BUILD files and associated dead code. We address debt found in dependency specifications, unbuildable targets, and unnecessary command line flags. These efforts often expose other forms of technical debt that must first be managed.

Counterfactual reasoning and learning systems: the example of computational advertising <=SEP=> This work shows how to leverage causal inference to understand the behavior of complex learning systems interacting with their environment and predict the consequences of changes to the system. Such predictions allow both humans and algorithms to select the changes that would have improved the system performance. This work is illustrated by experiments on the ad placement system associated with the Bing search engine.

A Fully Integrated Reconfigurable Self-Startup RF Energy-Harvesting System With Storage Capability <=SEP=> This paper introduces a fully integrated RF energy-harvesting system. The system can simultaneously deliver the current demanded by external dc loads and store the extra energy in external capacitors, during periods of extra output power. The design is fabricated in 0.18- $\mu \text{m}$  CMOS technology, and the active chip area is 1.08 mm2. The proposed self-startup system is reconfigurable with an integrated LC matching network, an RF rectifier, and a power management/controller unit, which consumes 66–157 nW. The required clock generation and the voltage reference circuit are integrated on the same chip. Duty cycle control is used to operate for the low input power that cannot provide the demanded output power. Moreover, the number of stages of the RF rectifier is reconfigurable to increase the efficiency of the available output power. For high available power, a secondary path is activated to charge an external energy storage element. The measured RF input power sensitivity is −14.8 dBm at a 1-V dc output.

HDTLR: A CNN based Hierarchical Detector for Traffic Lights <=SEP=> Reliable traffic light detection is one crucial key component for autonomous driving in urban areas. This includes the extraction of direction arrows contained within the traffic lights as an autonomous car will need this information for selecting the traffic light corresponding to its current lane. Current state of the art traffic light detection systems are not able to provide such information. Within this work we present a hierarchical traffic light detection algorithm, which is able to detect traffic lights and determine their state and contained direction information within one CNN forward pass. This Hierarchical DeepTLR (HDTLR) outperforms current state of the art traffic light detection algorithms in state aware detection and can detect traffic lights with direction information down to a size of 4 pixel in width at a frequency of 12 frames per second.

Implementation of behavior change techniques in mobile applications for physical activity. <=SEP=> BACKGROUND
Mobile applications (apps) for physical activity are popular and hold promise for promoting behavior change and reducing non-communicable disease risk. App marketing materials describe a limited number of behavior change techniques (BCTs), but apps may include unmarketed BCTs, which are important as well.


PURPOSE
To characterize the extent to which BCTs have been implemented in apps from a systematic user inspection of apps.


METHODS
Top-ranked physical activity apps (N=100) were identified in November 2013 and analyzed in 2014. BCTs were coded using a contemporary taxonomy following a user inspection of apps.


RESULTS
Users identified an average of 6.6 BCTs per app and most BCTs in the taxonomy were not represented in any apps. The most common BCTs involved providing social support, information about others' approval, instructions on how to perform a behavior, demonstrations of the behavior, and feedback on the behavior. A latent class analysis of BCT configurations revealed that apps focused on providing support and feedback as well as support and education.


CONCLUSIONS
Contemporary physical activity apps have implemented a limited number of BCTs and have favored BCTs with a modest evidence base over others with more established evidence of efficacy (e.g., social media integration for providing social support versus active self-monitoring by users). Social support is a ubiquitous feature of contemporary physical activity apps and differences between apps lie primarily in whether the limited BCTs provide education or feedback about physical activity.

Future affective technology for autism and emotion communication. <=SEP=> People on the autism spectrum often experience states of emotional or cognitive overload that pose challenges to their interests in learning and communicating. Measurements taken from home and school environments show that extreme overload experienced internally, measured as autonomic nervous system (ANS) activation, may not be visible externally: a person can have a resting heart rate twice the level of non-autistic peers, while outwardly appearing calm and relaxed. The chasm between what is happening on the inside and what is seen on the outside, coupled with challenges in speaking and being pushed to perform, is a recipe for a meltdown that may seem to come 'out of the blue', but in fact may have been steadily building. Because ANS activation both influences and is influenced by efforts to process sensory information, interact socially, initiate motor activity, produce meaningful speech and more, deciphering the dynamics of ANS states is important for understanding and helping people on the autism spectrum. This paper highlights advances in technology that can comfortably sense and communicate ANS arousal in daily life, allowing new kinds of investigations to inform the science of autism while also providing personalized feedback to help individuals who participate in the research.

Toward Massive Machine Type Cellular Communications <=SEP=> Cellular networks have been engineered and optimized to carrying ever-increasing amounts of mobile data, but over the last few years, a new class of applications based on machine-centric communications has begun to emerge. Automated devices such as sensors, tracking devices, and meters, often referred to as machine-to-machine (M2M) or machine-type communications (MTC), introduce an attractive revenue stream for mobile network operators, if a massive number of them can be efficiently supported. The novel technical challenges posed by MTC applications include increased overhead and control signaling as well as diverse application-specific constraints such as ultra-low complexity, extreme energy efficiency, critical timing, and continuous data intensive uploading. This article explains the new requirements and challenges that large-scale MTC applications introduce, and provides a survey of key techniques for overcoming them. We focus on the potential of 4.5G and 5G networks to serve both the high data rate needs of conventional human-type communication (HTC) subscribers and the forecasted billions of new MTC devices. We also opine on attractive economic models that will enable this new class of cellular subscribers to grow to its full potential.

A class D output stage with zero dead time <=SEP=> An integrated class-D output stage has been realized with zero dead time, thereby removing one of the dominant sources of distortion in class-D amplifiers. Dead time is eliminated through proper dimensioning of the power transistor drivers and accurate matching of switch timing. Open-loop distortion of this output stage stays below 0.1% up to 35 W.

Partially Observable Reinforcement Learning for Intelligent Transportation Systems <=SEP=> Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) have attracted the attention of researchers and the general public alike as a means to alleviate traffic congestion. Recently, the maturity of wireless technology has enabled a cost-efficient way to achieve ITS by detecting vehicles using Vehicle to Infrastructure (V2I) communications. Traditional ITS algorithms, in most cases, assume that every vehicle is observed, such as by a camera or a loop detector, but a V2I implementation would detect only those vehicles with wireless communications capability. We examine a family of transportation systems, which we will refer to as ‘Partially Detected Intelligent Transportation Systems’. An algorithm that can act well under a small detection rate is highly desirable due to gradual penetration rates of the underlying wireless technologies such as Dedicated Short Range Communications (DSRC) technology. Artificial Intelligence (AI) techniques for Reinforcement Learning (RL) are suitable tools for finding such an algorithm due to utilizing varied inputs and not requiring explicit analytic understanding or modeling of the underlying system dynamics. In this paper, we report a RL algorithm for partially observable ITS based on DSRC. The performance of this system is studied under different car flows, detection rates, and topologies of the road network. Our system is able to efficiently reduce the average waiting time of vehicles at an intersection, even with a low detection rate.

Fuzzy & Datamining based Disease Prediction Using K-NN Algorithm <=SEP=> Disease diagnosis is one of the most important applications of such system as it is one of the leading causes of deaths all over the world. Almost all system predicting disease use inputs from complex tests conducted in labs and none of the system predicts disease based on the risk factors such as tobacco smoking, alcohol intake, age, family history, diabetes, hypertension, high cholesterol, physical inactivity, obesity. Researchers have been using several data mining techniques to help health care professionals in the diagnosis of heart disease. K-Nearest-Neighbour (KNN) is one of the successful data mining techniques used in classification problems. However, it is less used in the diagnosis of heart disease patients. Recently, researchers are showing that combining different classifiers through voting is outperforming other single classifiers. This paper investigates applying KNN to help healthcare professionals in the diagnosis of disease specially heart disease. It also investigates if integrating voting with KNN can enhance its accuracy in the diagnosis of heart disease patients. The results show that applying KNN could achieve higher accuracy than neural network ensemble in the diagnosis of heart disease patients. The results also show that applying voting could not enhance the KNN accuracy in the diagnosis of heart disease.

ENHANCEMENT STRATEGIES FOR FRAME-TO-FRAME UAS STEREO VISUAL ODOMETRY <=SEP=> Autonomous navigation of indoor unmanned aircraft systems (UAS) requires accurate pose estimations usually obtained from indirect measurements. Navigation based on inertial measurement units (IMU) is known to be affected by high drift rates. The incorporation of cameras provides complementary information due to the different underlying measurement principle. The scale ambiguity problem for monocular cameras is avoided when a light-weight stereo camera setup is used. However, also frame-to-frame stereo visual odometry (VO) approaches are known to accumulate pose estimation errors over time. Several valuable real-time capable techniques for outlier detection and drift reduction in frame-to-frame VO, for example robust relative orientation estimation using random sample consensus (RANSAC) and bundle adjustment, are available. This study addresses the problem of choosing appropriate VO components. We propose a frame-to-frame stereo VO method based on carefully selected components and parameters. This method is evaluated regarding the impact and value of different outlier detection and drift-reduction strategies, for example keyframe selection and sparse bundle adjustment (SBA), using reference benchmark data as well as own real stereo data. The experimental results demonstrate that our VO method is able to estimate quite accurate trajectories. Feature bucketing and keyframe selection are simple but effective strategies which further improve the VO results. Furthermore, introducing the stereo baseline constraint in pose graph optimization (PGO) leads to significant improvements. * Corresponding author

An Empirical Analysis of Deep Network Loss Surfaces <=SEP=> The training of deep neural networks is a high-dimension optimization problem with respect to the loss function of a model. Unfortunately, these functions are of high dimension and non-convex and hence difficult to characterize. In this paper, we empirically investigate the geometry of the loss functions for state-of-the-art networks with multiple stochastic optimization methods. We do this through several experiments that are visualized on polygons to understand how and when these stochastic optimization methods find local minima.

Now it's personal: on abusive game design <=SEP=> In this paper, we introduce the concept of abusive game design as an attitude towards creating games -- an aesthetic practice that operates as a critique of certain conventionalisms in popular game design wisdom. We emphasize that abusive game design is, at its core, about spotlighting the dialogic relation between player and designer.

Classification of Multiple-Sentence Questions <=SEP=> Conventional QA systems cannot answer to the questions composed of two or more sentences. Therefore, we aim to construct a QA system that can answer such multiple-sentence questions. As the first stage, we propose a method for classifying multiple-sentence questions into question types. Specifically, we first extract the core sentence from a given question text. We use the core sentence and its question focus in question classification. The result of experiments shows that the proposed method improves F-measure by 8.8% and accuracy by 4.4%.

Chemical-protein relation extraction with ensembles of SVM, CNN, and RNN models <=SEP=> Text mining the relations between chemicals and proteins is an increasingly important task. The CHEMPROT track at BioCreative VI aims to promote the development and evaluation of systems that can automatically detect the chemical-protein relations in running text (PubMed abstracts). This manuscript describes our submission, which is an ensemble of three systems, including a Support Vector Machine, a Convolutional Neural Network, and a Recurrent Neural Network. Their output is combined using a decision based on majority voting or stacking. Our CHEMPROT system obtained 0.7266 in precision and 0.5735 in recall for an f-score of 0.6410, demonstrating the effectiveness of machine learning-based approaches for automatic relation extraction from biomedical literature. Our submission achieved the highest performance in the task during the 2017 challenge. Keywords—relation extraction; deep learning; chemical; protein

EasyConnect: A Management System for IoT Devices and Its Applications for Interactive Design and Art <=SEP=> Many Internet of Things (IoT) technologies have been used in applications for money flow, logistics flow, people flow, interactive art design, and so on. To manage these increasing disparate devices and connectivity options, ETSI has specified end-to-end machine-to-machine (M2M) system architecture for IoT applications. Based on this architecture, we develop an IoT EasyConnect system to manage IoT devices. In our approach, an IoT device is characterized by its “features” (e.g., temperature, vibration, and display) that are manipulated by the network applications. If a network application handles the individual device features independently, then we can write a software module for each device feature, and the network application can be simply constructed by including these brick-like device feature modules. Based on the concept of device feature, brick-like software modules can provide simple and efficient mechanism to develop IoT device applications and interactions.

Inherent Resistance of Efficient ECC Designs against SCA Attacks <=SEP=> The Montgomery kP algorithm using Lopez-Dahab projective coordinates is a time and energy efficient way to perform the elliptic curve point multiplication. It even can provide resistance against simple power analysis attacks. Nevertheless, straight forward implementations of this algorithm are not resistant against differential power analysis attacks. But highly-efficient designs i.e. designs in which different functional units are operating in parallel can increase the resistance of ECC implementations against DPA. In this paper we demonstrate this fact on the examples of our 6 implementations of the Montgomery kP algorithm. We perform horizontal DPA attacks to demonstrate the fact that the resistance of the kP algorithm against side channel analysis attacks can be increased through its implementation as an efficient design.

The Theory of Correlation Formulas and Their Application to Discourse Coherence <=SEP=> The Winograd Schema Challenge (WSC) was proposed as a measure of machine intelligence. It boils down to anaphora resolution, a task familiar from computational linguistics. Research in linguistics and AI has coalesced around discourse coherence as the critical factor in solving this task, and the process of establishing discourse coherence relies fundamentally on world and commonsense knowledge. In this thesis, we build on an approach to establishing coherence on the basis of correlation. The utility of this approach lies in its conceptual clarity and ability to flexibly represent commonsense knowledge. We work to fill some conceptual holes with the Correlation Calculus approach. First, understanding the calculus in a vacuum is not straightfoward unless it has a precise semantics. Second, existing demonstrations of the Correlation Calculus on Winograd Schema Challenge problems have not been linguistically credible. We hope to ameliorate some—but by no means all—of the outstanding issues with the Correlation Calculus. We do so first by providing a precise semantics of the calculus, which relates our intuitive understanding of correlation with a precise notion involving probabilities. Second, we formulate the establishment of discourse coherence by correlation formulas within the framework of Discourse Representation Theory. This provides a more complete and linguistically credible account of the relationship between the Correlation Calculus, discourse coherence, and Winograd Schema Challenge problems.

Game-Related Statistics that Discriminated Winning, Drawing and Losing Teams from the Spanish Soccer League. <=SEP=> The aim of the present study was to analyze men's football competitions, trying to identify which game-related statistics allow to discriminate winning, drawing and losing teams. The sample used corresponded to 380 games from the 2008-2009 season of the Spanish Men's Professional League. The game-related statistics gathered were: total shots, shots on goal, effectiveness, assists, crosses, offsides commited and received, corners, ball possession, crosses against, fouls committed and received, corners against, yellow and red cards, and venue. An univariate (t-test) and multivariate (discriminant) analysis of data was done. The results showed that winning teams had averages that were significantly higher for the following game statistics: total shots (p < 0.001), shots on goal (p < 0.01), effectiveness (p < 0.01), assists (p < 0.01), offsides committed (p < 0.01) and crosses against (p < 0.01). Losing teams had significantly higher averages in the variable crosses (p < 0.01), offsides received (p < 0. 01) and red cards (p < 0.01). Discriminant analysis allowed to conclude the following: the variables that discriminate between winning, drawing and losing teams were the total shots, shots on goal, crosses, crosses against, ball possession and venue. Coaches and players should be aware for these different profiles in order to increase knowledge about game cognitive and motor solicitation and, therefore, to evaluate specificity at the time of practice and game planning. Key pointsThis paper increases the knowledge about soccer match analysis.Give normative values to establish practice and match objectives.Give applications ideas to connect research with coaches' practice.

Free radicals and antioxidants in human health: current status and future prospects. <=SEP=> Free radicals and related species have attracted a great deal of attention in recent years. They are mainly derived from oxygen (reactive oxygen species/ROS) and nitrogen (reactive nitrogen species/RNS), and are generated in our body by various endogenous systems, exposure to different physicochemical conditions or pathophysiological states. Free radicals can adversely alter lipids, proteins and DNA and have been implicated in aging and a number of human diseases. Lipids are highly prone to free radical damage resulting in lipid peroxidation that can lead to adverse alterations. Free radical damage to protein can result in loss of enzyme activity. Damage caused to DNA, can result in mutagenesis and carcinogenesis. Redox signaling is a major area of free radical research that is attracting attention. Nature has endowed us with protective antioxidant mechanisms- superoxide dismutase (SOD), catalase, glutathione, glutathione peroxidases and reductase, vitamin E (tocopherols and tocotrienols), vitamin C etc., apart from many dietary components. There are epidemiological evidences correlating higher intake of components/ foods with antioxidant abilities to lower incidence of various human morbidities or mortalities. Current research reveals the different potential applications of antioxidant/free radical manipulations in prevention or control of disease. Natural products from dietary components such as Indian spices and medicinal plants are known to possess antioxidant activity. Newer and future approaches include gene therapy to produce more antioxidants in the body, genetically engineered plant products with higher level of antioxidants, synthetic antioxidant enzymes (SOD mimics), novel biomolecules and the use of functional foods enriched with antioxidants.

Cultivate Self-Efficacy for Personal and Organizational Effectiveness <=SEP=> Bandura, A. (2000). Cultivate self-efficacy for personal and organizational effectiveness. In E.

Power LDMOS with novel STI profile for improved Rsp, BVdss, and reliability <=SEP=> The profile of shallow trench isolation (STI) is designed to improve LDMOS specific on-resistance (Rsp), BVDSS, safe operating area (SOA), and hot carrier lifetimes (HCL) in an integrated BiCMOS power technology. Silicon etch, liner oxidation and CMP processes are tuned to improve the tradeoffs in a power technology showing significant improvement to both p-channel and n-channel Rsp compared to devices fabricated with the STI profile inherited from the original submicron CMOS platform. Extensive TCAD and experiments were carried out to gain insight into the physical mechanisms and further improve device performance after STI process optimization. The final process and device structures yield SOAs that are limited only by thermal constraints up to rated voltages

A Hygroscopic Sensor Electrode for Fast Stabilized Non-Contact ECG Signal Acquisition <=SEP=> A capacitive electrocardiography (cECG) technique using a non-invasive ECG measuring technology that does not require direct contact between the sensor and the skin has attracted much interest. The system encounters several challenges when the sensor electrode and subject's skin are weakly coupled. Because there is no direct physical contact between the subject and any grounding point, there is no discharge path for the built-up electrostatic charge. Subsequently, the electrostatic charge build-up can temporarily contaminate the ECG signal from being clearly visible; a stabilization period (3-15 min) is required for the measurement of a clean, stable ECG signal at low humidity levels (below 55% relative humidity). Therefore, to obtain a clear ECG signal without noise and to reduce the ECG signal stabilization time to within 2 min in a dry ambient environment, we have developed a fabric electrode with embedded polymer (FEEP). The designed hygroscopic FEEP has an embedded superabsorbent polymer layer. The principle of FEEP as a conductive electrode is to provide humidity to the capacitive coupling to ensure strong coupling and to allow for the measurement of a stable, clear biomedical signal. The evaluation results show that hygroscopic FEEP is capable of rapidly measuring high-accuracy ECG signals with a higher SNR ratio.

A 3.9-ps RMS Precision Time-to-Digital Converter Using Ones-Counter Encoding Scheme in a Kintex-7 FPGA <=SEP=> A 3.9-ps time-interval rms precision and 277-M events/second measurement throughput time-to-digital converter (TDC) is implemented in a Xilinx Kintex-7 field programmable gate array (FPGA). Unlike previous work, the TDC is achieved with a multichain tapped-delay line (TDL) followed by an ones-counter encoder. The four normal TDLs merged together make the TDC bins very small, so that the time precision can be significantly improved. The ones-counter encoder naturally applies global bubble error correction to the output of TDL, thus the TDC design is relatively simple even when using FPGAs made with current advanced process technology. The TDC implementation is a generally applicable method that can simultaneously achieve high time precision and high measurement throughput.

Comparative Evaluation of Background Subtraction Algorithms in Remote Scene Videos Captured by MWIR Sensors <=SEP=> Background subtraction (BS) is one of the most commonly encountered tasks in video analysis and tracking systems. It distinguishes the foreground (moving objects) from the video sequences captured by static imaging sensors. Background subtraction in remote scene infrared (IR) video is important and common to lots of fields. This paper provides a Remote Scene IR Dataset captured by our designed medium-wave infrared (MWIR) sensor. Each video sequence in this dataset is identified with specific BS challenges and the pixel-wise ground truth of foreground (FG) for each frame is also provided. A series of experiments were conducted to evaluate BS algorithms on this proposed dataset. The overall performance of BS algorithms and the processor/memory requirements were compared. Proper evaluation metrics or criteria were employed to evaluate the capability of each BS algorithm to handle different kinds of BS challenges represented in this dataset. The results and conclusions in this paper provide valid references to develop new BS algorithm for remote scene IR video sequence, and some of them are not only limited to remote scene or IR video sequence but also generic for background subtraction. The Remote Scene IR dataset and the foreground masks detected by each evaluated BS algorithm are available online: https://github.com/JerryYaoGl/BSEvaluationRemoteSceneIR.

Can You Spot the Fakes?: On the Limitations of User Feedback in Online Social Networks <=SEP=> Online social networks (OSNs) are appealing platforms for spammers and fraudsters, who typically use fake or compromised accounts to connect with and defraud real users. To combat such abuse, OSNs allow users to report fraudulent profiles or activity. The OSN can then use reporting data to review and/or limit activity of reported accounts. Previous authors have suggested that an OSN can augment its takedown algorithms by identifying a “trusted set” of users whose reports are weighted more heavily in the disposition of flagged accounts. Such identification would allow the OSN to improve both speed and accuracy of fake account detection and thus reduce the impact of spam on users. In this work we provide the first public, data-driven assessment of whether the above assumption is true: are some users better at reporting than others? Specifically, is reporting skill both measurable, i.e., possible to distinguish from random guessing; and repeatable, i.e., persistent over repeated sampling? Our main contributions are to develop a statistical framework that describes these properties and to apply this framework to data from LinkedIn, the professional social network. Our data includes member reports of fake profiles as well as the more voluminous, albeit weaker, signal of member responses to connection requests. We find that members demonstrating measurable, repeatable skill in identifying fake profiles do exist but are rare: at most 2.4% of those reporting fakes and at most 1.3% of those rejecting connection requests. We conclude that any reliable “trusted set” of members will be too small to have noticeable impact on spam metrics.

How to practice person‐centred care: A conceptual framework <=SEP=> BACKGROUND
Globally, health-care systems and organizations are looking to improve health system performance through the implementation of a person-centred care (PCC) model. While numerous conceptual frameworks for PCC exist, a gap remains in practical guidance on PCC implementation.


METHODS
Based on a narrative review of the PCC literature, a generic conceptual framework was developed in collaboration with a patient partner, which synthesizes evidence, recommendations and best practice from existing frameworks and implementation case studies. The Donabedian model for health-care improvement was used to classify PCC domains into the categories of "Structure," "Process" and "Outcome" for health-care quality improvement.


DISCUSSION
The framework emphasizes the structural domain, which relates to the health-care system or context in which care is delivered, providing the foundation for PCC, and influencing the processes and outcomes of care. Structural domains identified include: the creation of a PCC culture across the continuum of care; co-designing educational programs, as well as health promotion and prevention programs with patients; providing a supportive and accommodating environment; and developing and integrating structures to support health information technology and to measure and monitor PCC performance. Process domains describe the importance of cultivating communication and respectful and compassionate care; engaging patients in managing their care; and integration of care. Outcome domains identified include: access to care and Patient-Reported Outcomes.


CONCLUSION
This conceptual framework provides a step-wise roadmap to guide health-care systems and organizations in the provision PCC across various health-care sectors.