PURPOSE To provide standards for medically integrated dispensing of oral anticancer drugs and supportive care medications. METHODS An Expert Panel was formed, and a systematic review of the literature on patient-centered best practices for the delivery of oral anticancer and supportive care drugs was performed to April 2019 using PubMed and Google Scholar. Available patient-centered standards, including one previously developed by the National Community Oncology Dispensing Association (NCODA), were considered for endorsement. Public comments were solicited and considered in preparation of the final manuscript. RESULTS A high-quality systematic review that was current to May 2016 was adopted into the evidence base. Five additional primary studies of multifaceted interventions met the inclusion criteria. These studies generally included a multicomponent intervention, often led by an oncology pharmacist, and also included patient education and regular follow-up and monitoring. These interventions resulted in significant improvements to patient quality and safety and demonstrated improvements in adherence and other patient outcomes. CONCLUSION The findings of the systematic review were consistent with the NCODA patient-centered standards for patient relationships and education, adherence, safety, collection of data, documentation, and other areas. NCODA standards were adopted and used as basis for these American Society of Clinical Oncology/NCODA standards. Additional information is available at www.asco.org/mid-standards .
So-called full-face masks are essential for fire fighters to ensure respiratory protection in smoke diving incidents. While such masks are absolutely necessary for protection purposes on one hand, they impair the voice communication of fire fighters drastically on the other hand. For this reason communication systems should be used to amplify the speech and, therefore, to improve the communication quality. This paper gives an overview of communication enhancement techniques for masks based on digital signal processing. The presented communication system picks up the speech signal by a microphone in the mask, enhance it, and play back the amplified signal by loudspeakers located on the outside of such masks. Since breathing noise is also picked up by the microphone, it's advantageous to recognize and suppress it -especially since breathing noise is very loud (usually much louder than the recorded voice). A voice activity detection distinguishes between side talkers, pause, breathing out, breathing in, and speech. It ensures that only speech components are played back. Due to the fact that the microphone is located close to the loudspeakers, the output signals are coupling back into the microphone and feedback may occur even at moderate gains. This can be reduced by feedback reduction (consisting of cancellation and suppression approaches). To enhance the functionality of the canceler a decorrelation stage can be applied to the enhanced signal before loudspeaker playback. As a consequence of all processing stages, the communication can be improved significantly, as the results of measurements of real-time mask systems show.Early masks such as the model depicted in Fig. 1 support voice communication only in a passive manner. If two fire fighters that wear such masks want to communicate they have to shout to each other. As a consequence, the speech intelligibility in a noisy environment is rather limited with such passive masks.Beside the communication among fire fighters in a direct neighbourhood also other communication channels are of importance. During incidents, fire fighters usually operate in troops of two to four people and they need to communicate in order to act uniformly, while, e.g., crawling for injured people in a building that is on fire. The head of the troop has to report the observed situation of each room to the team leader, who is usually located outside the building. This is done via a so-called tactical radio unit.The internal troop communication (the communication among fire fighters) is not that easy due to the high attenuation of the masks (even of most of today's models). To get an impression of this attenuation, the power spectral density of a multitude of speech signals was measured in a
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