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Communication is the key tool to success. When it comes to healthcare communication, there is a vast gap between medical professionals and patients especially people with a lesser education and people belonging to rural areas. Communication is very much essential in providing quality medical care and content to patients. The effect of the languages and the scientific terms used by medical professionals becomes difficult for the common audience to understand; hence, the understanding gap also increases. This study demonstrates how language becomes a hurdle in healthcare communication depending on the location or locality of the hospital. The main objective of this research paper is to find how language becomes a barrier in health communication depending on the location of the hospital and the communication challenges experienced by rural and urban audiences in hospitals. It will also focus on how infographic designs can help the audience in reducing the communication gap in understanding healthcare information. We have collected 300 samples from 20 different hospitals from both Rural & Urban areas of Jaipur-I City, Rajasthan India. The paper also highlights some of the challenges posed by the language barrier and recommends a few suggestions. This research finding indicates that the language barrier in health communication can be minimized with the use of infographic designs for communication with the audience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Introduction: Laboratory Request Form (LRF) offers communication triad involving patient, physician and diagnostic service providers. LRFs with complete patient's clinical information along with the diagnostic results may be used as predictor tool for emerging diseases. Overcrowding of wards in developing countries, especially in India, may affect physician's effectiveness causing an appalling lack of clinical symptoms in LRFs or mostly left unattended by form attendees. Solving this problem certainly requires a novel method of data collection with the aim of improving the physician's attention. Aim: The objective of this study was two-fold: (1) to determine the proportion of unattended and partially filled LRFs; and (2) to evaluate the effectiveness of pictograms over text oriented symptoms. Materials and Methods: A total of 645 Pictogram based LRF (PLRF) were provided as an overleaf along with the Text oriented LRFs (TLRF). The percentages of blank form, total symptoms per form, and individual symptoms per form were calculated. Physicians Attention Index (PAI) was also calculated based on the number of LRFs in which physicians filled the duration of one or more symptoms. The difference in frequencies of categorical responses between two dependent groups was calculated by way of the comparison of proportions and chi-square. A two-sided p-value <0.05 was considered as the test of significance for all parameters. Results: A significant proportion of unattended forms decreased upon implementation of PLRFs (23.4% vs. 11.8%; p-value =0.0001). Notably, symptoms such as headache, abdominal pain, rhinorrhea, knee pain showed the most improved proportions of all. During this study period, dengue accounts for >80% of the test request provided with more number of associated symptoms. Interestingly, PAI was 0.125 (21.7%) in PLRFs and this could not be possible in the default TLRF. Conclusion: Revisiting of LRF is need of the hour in order to get maximum attention from form attendees thereby improving adequacy in test requesting information. This will ultimately aid the physician or diagnostic service providers to offer differential diagnosis which in turn improves the quality of patient care. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we explore the problem of establishing a network among the stocks of a market at high frequency level and give an application to program trading. Our work uses high frequency data from the National Stock Exchange, India, for the year 2014. To begin, we analyse the spectrum of the correlation matrix to establish the presence of linear relations amongst the stock returns. A comparison of correlations with pairwise mutual information shows the further existence of non-linear relations which are not captured by correlation. We also see that the non-linear relations are more pronounced at the high frequency level in comparison to the daily returns used in earlier work. We provide two applications of this approach. First, we construct minimal spanning trees for the stock network based on mutual information and study their topology. The year 2014 saw the conduct of general elections in India and the data allows us to explore their impact on aspects of the network, such as the scale-free property and sectorial clusters. Second, having established the presence of non-linear relations, we would like to be able to exploit them. Previous authors have suggested that peripheral stocks in the network would make good proxies for the Markowitz portfolio but with a much smaller number of stocks. We show that peripheral stocks selected using mutual information perform significantly better than ones selected using correlation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In a Perspective, David Peiris and Dorairaj Prabhakaran discuss implications and challenges of cardiovascular disease risk assessments in the population of India. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we model the bus networks of six major Indian cities as graphs in L-space, and evaluate their various statistical properties. While airline and railway networks have been extensively studied, a comprehensive study on the structure and growth of bus networks is lacking. In India, where bus transport plays an important role in day-to-day commutation, it is of significant interest to analyze its topological structure and answer basic questions on its evolution, growth, robustness and resiliency. Although the common feature of small-world property is observed, our analysis reveals a wide spectrum of network topologies arising due to significant variation in the degree-distribution patterns in the networks. We also observe that these networks although, robust and resilient to random attacks are particularly degree-sensitive. Unlike real-world networks, such as Internet, WWW and airline, that are virtual, bus networks are physically constrained. Our findings therefore, throw light on the evolution of such geographically and constrained networks that will help us in designing more efficient bus networks in the future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]