Assimilating Healthcare Information Systems in a Malaysian Hospital

The importance of information systems/information technology (IS/IT) to healthcare organisations is being recognised today as paramount and critical in order to realise superior healthcare delivery. Successful assimilation of IS/IT, which is the central focus of this study, then becomes a key consideration in ensuring that IS/IT is appropriately and systematically deployed into a healthcare organisation. The key findings from this research indicate that there are people, process, technology and environment elements that should be considered as facilitators to the healthcare information systems (HIS) assimilation process, as well as barriers that the healthcare organisation should overcome throughout the entire assimilation process or at specific stages. This research, therefore, is not only topical but especially beneficial to management and administrators in the web of healthcare players as they grapple with trying to successfully assimilate HIS into their respective organisations

Critical success factors in the design of suitable oncology platforms

Cancer, a chronic disease has become one of the primary causes of death in advanced countries. The diagnosis, medication and treatment for cancer is very expensive. Healthcare providers, especially in cancer care, need to automate and accelerate access to patient data and evidence based decision making along with greater quality control and safety. Oncology information systems (OIS) provide a simple solution for this. This study compared 3 different leading international oncology information systems capable of delivering high-value, patient centred care to cancer patients in the Australian context. This work analysed functionality, usability and interoperability of these systems for the Australian healthcare environment and their integration with existing systems and assets. Critical success factors in the design of platforms to make them perform better from clinicians’ and patients’ points of view have also been discussed

Serving an Indigenous community: Exploring the cultural competence of medical students in a rural setting

Since 2013, medical students from the International Medical University (IMU) in Malaysia have been providing primary healthcare services, under the supervision of faculty members, to the indigenous people living in Kampung Sebir. The project has allowed the students to learn experientially within a rural setting. This study aims to examine the cultural competence of IMU medical students through an examination of their perspective of the indigenous people who they serve and the role of this community service in their personal and professional development. Students who participated in the project were required to complete a questionnaire after each community engagement activity to help them reflect on the above areas. We analysed the responses of students from January to December 2015 using a thematic analysis approach to identify overarching themes in the students’ responses. Students had differing perceptions of culture and worldviews when compared to the indigenous people. However, they lacked the self-reflection skills necessary to understand how such differences can affect their relationship with the indigenous people. Because of this, the basis of their engagement with the indigenous community (as demonstrated by their views of community service) is focused on their agenda of promoting health from a student’s perspective rather than connecting and building relationships first. Students also lacked the appreciation that building cultural competency is a continuous process. The results show that the medical students have a developing cultural competence. The project in Kampung Sebir is an experiential learning platform of great value to provide insights into and develop the cultural competency of participating students. This study also reflects on the project itself, and how the relationship with stakeholders, the competence and diversity of academic staff, and the support of the university can contribute toward training in cultural competence

Prioritizing critical factors to successful adoption of total hospital information system

Although the benefits of adopting Hospital Information System (HIS) innovation are well known, only a few hospitals in Malaysia have actually adopted it. Surprisingly, there is scarcity of study specifically in the context of Malaysia related to Total Hospital Information System (THIS) adoption. Therefore, the aim of this study is to provide more insight regarding the THIS adoption in the context of Malaysia and as well to explore the potential factors that are connected to the hospitals’ adoption of THIS technology. To this end, this study developed a conceptual framework on the basis of Technology Organization Environment (TOE) for the adoption of THIS by Malaysian hospitals. Accordingly, a Fuzzy AHP model is developed to determine the weights of factors in the three categories for the THIS adoption. These factors are identified and compared by hospital experts and decision makers, who are fully familiar of THIS technology with also professional management and decision-making experience in the healthcare industry. Then fuzzy AHP is applied to compute the weights of incorporated factors in the THIS adoption model. This can result at fostering the uptake of HIS and facilitating its reluctant trend by improving the decision of hospitals towards THIS adoption

USING A CO-EVOLUTIONARY IS-ALIGNMENT APPROACH TO UNDERSTAND EMR IMPLEMENTATIONS

Electronic Medical Records (EMRs) are repositories of electronic medical histories of patients, main-tained over time. Hospital operations and EMRs typically become interdependent, due to the inclusion of medical workflow- and administrative process support as core functionalities. Hence, it is profoundly challenging to effectively enable complex, multi-stakeholder clinical processes, enhance patient care, and align EMRs with hospital strategies, goals, and needs. In this study, we build upon co-evolutionary IS-alignment (COISA) theories and argue that current approaches to business-IT alignment in hospitals should be reconceptualised, particularly regarding modern EMR implementations. In this effort, we respond to the call for more empirical research on business-IT co-evolution. We unfold how COISA manifests during EMR implementations using a multiple case study method. This method allows us to get a rich understanding of the complex social phenomena that emerge during EMR implementations. Outcomes show that COISA manifests in all three cases, involving different stakeholder groups, but in different localities and intensities. These findings suggest that COISA is a suitable framework to de-scribe and understand EMR implementations and that different configurations of interaction patterns can lead to comparable results. This understanding enables EMR practitioners to more effectively iden-tify improvement areas in dealing with internal and external complexity

Development of implementation models for hospital information system (HIS) in Malaysian public hospitals

Studies have shown that Hospital Information System (HIS) implementation improve hospital’s management and activities in terms of cost and time reductions. However, there are only 15.2% out of 138 Malaysian Public Hospitals implemented HIS. Literatures have further highlighted various issues and challenges with regards to its implementation. Therefore, this study aimed to explore the implementation of THIS, IHIS and BHIS’s hospitals as well as factors affecting them. This study employed a mixed methods approach to answer the research objectives. In the first phase of this study, semi-structured interviews were conducted with nine participants consisted of the hospital directors, Information Technology officers and HIS users. It is found that THIS’s hospital implementation phases differed from IHIS and BHIS’s hospitals, while IHIS and BHIS’s hospitals have similar phases based on Business Interaction Phases of Business Action Theory. Human context was discovered to play important roles in the HIS implementation. A survey was conducted in the second phase of this study among HIS users at different categories of HIS’s hospitals. Two hundred and twenty-nine questionnaires were returned to yield a response rate of 45.8%. Based on ANOVA findings, factors affecting THIS implementation were significantly different from those in IHIS and BHIS’s hospitals. There was no significance different between IHIS and BHIS’s hospitals. There are three major contributions of this study: 1) Distinctive implementation phases for THIS hospital and IHIS-BHIS hospital were discovered for HIS implementation. 2) New models of HIS implementation which highlight the Human context were proposed, and 3) Different factors were found to affect HIS implementation at different types of HIS’s hospitals

ENABLING EHEALTH IN TRADITIONAL MEDICINE: A SYSTEMATIC REVIEW OF INFORMATION SYSTEMS INTEGRATION REQUIREMENTS

This paper shall investigate the information systems integration needs towards eHealth implementation in Traditional Medicine. This review seeks to answer questions related to the locations of the integration points for integrated systems for the accessibility of electronic health records in both Traditional Medicine and modern medicine to identify of the most suitable health information systems model and the selection of the concrete integration technologies and standards to be implemented. A systematic literature review was conducted to select the relevant studies. A total of 11 articles were finally included for assessment. The findings of this review revealed that data integration is considered the most important precondition for the basis of further integration and is the backbone or starting point of a successful integration project. Other information systems integration needs are information model, interoperability standards, workflow or process integration and access to multiple repositories from different platforms. Establishment of Traditional Medicine databases of medications, procedures, information and diseases is crucial to ensure a generic and extensible information model can be designed so that new data sources can be integrated without major changes to the data schema

Professionalism among nurses in Malaysia : Does it exist?

Professionalism has been discussed among nurses for years. Nursing in Malaysia also experiences a gradual progression toward professionalism despite the rapid development of nursing education. Anecdotally, every nurse will rather admit that they are professional. However, there might be a possibility of speaking of it rather than doing it. This paper explores the existence of professionalism among nurses in Malaysia empirically and discusses pertinent research and/or studies that were conducted within the Malaysia context in the recent years. Numerous literature pertinent to professionalism in nursing were discussed. Several pertinent papers explored and discussed diversely in the context of professionalism in nursing nevertheless mainly conceived from the western countries’ perspectives. Furthermore, a marginalized amount of literature discuss professionalism in nursing within Malaysia context. This paper is likely to suggest the need to amplify the needs of researching the existence of professionalism in nursing practice and to reinstate the significance of the elements of professionalism among nurses in Malaysia in education and practice. KEYWORDS: Professionalism, nursing, Malaysi

Improving the Communication Skills of IS Developers during Requirements Elicitation using Experiential Learning

The improvement of communication skills among Information Systems (IS) developers can be considered as a strategy to mitigate the risk of project failure during IS design. This paper addresses issues on various communication barriers normally encountered during its requirements elicitation (RE) stage. This study aims to adopt experiential learning as a method to improve the communication skills of IS developers during RE techniques such as prototype presentations. As such, an educational multimedia, which teaches communication skill enhancement among professionals during presentations, served as an interventional tool for experiential learning. Using a longitudinal quasi-experiment, the developers’ self-assessments of their communication skills during prototype presentations at pre- and post-intervention were compared and analyzed using the WordStat® software. Responses showed significant improvements on the presentation skills especially on keywords-in-context related to the audience, information, interest, prototype, room, summary, and talk. This signifies the influence of such learning method to the developers at post-intervention. Further, the study implies that experiential learning can be empirically supported to effectively motivate IS developers in improving their presentation skills after receiving a learning intervention. Thus, experiential learning can be used by project managers as an effective training strategy to improve the communication skills of their IS developers in preparation to current and future projects on IS design especially during prototype presentations of the RE stage