Multimedia Database Systems in Education, Training, and Product Demonstration
Publisher Summary Multimedia computing and networking changes the style of interaction between computer and human. With the growth of the Internet, multimedia applications such as educational software, electronic commerce applications, and video games have brought a great impact on the way humans think of, use, and rely on computers/networks. One of the most important technologies to support these applications is distributed multimedia-database management system (MDBMS). This chapter summarizes research issues and the state-of-the-art technologies of MDBMSs from the perspective of multimedia presentations. Multimedia presentations are used widely in several forms, from instruction delivery to advertisement and electronic commerce, and in different software architectures, from a standalone computer to a local area networked computer and World Wide Web servers. These varieties of architectures result in different organization of MDBMSs.
Despite the fact that since 1985 the government of Quebec increased by 5.75 % on average the amount of money spent on healthcare per year, little improvement was noted. It is obvious that an optimal use of resources is essential to reduce waiting times and provide safer and faster services to patients. The use of new technology can contribute to improve the healthcare system efficiency. Our study aims to assess the impact of a medication distribution technology on 1) the performance of a health and social services center’s pharmacy, 2) the performance of one care unit in a nursing home and on 3) the medication-use process safety. To measure performance we were inspired by the Lean approach. The results show that medication distribution technology is considered as an effective way to significantly detect medication errors, to allow nurses to focus more on patients and pharmacy to react more rapidly to changes in patient medications.