The influence of patient absorptive capacity and perception of technology characteristics on patients' satisfaction with medical services in Guangzhou, China: an affordance theory based approach

Background: Based on the theory of Affordance, this thesis proposes two analytical dimensions of Subjective Affordance (SA) and Behavioral Affordance (BA).The research aims to explore the influence of patients’ Absorptive Capacity (AC) and Technology Characteristics Perception (TCP) on their SA and BA of the WeChat client-side app in community hospitals so as to further evaluate the SA and BA influence on patients’ satisfaction of medical service (PS). Research subjects are patients who have used the community hospital WeChat client-side information platform in 28 community health service centers in nine districts of Guangzhou in the South of China. A questionnaire with 4 sections and 44 questions was designed and distributed. The effective questionnaire data were checked for descriptive analysis and a path model with 5 observed variables (AC,TCP, SA,BA,PS). was developed. Results: 1. A total of 410 questionnaires was distributed, of which 400 have been collected and 387 of them were valid and analyzed. 2. There is a significant difference among variable scores of patients with different ages and educational background. 3. The group of patients who use the information platform more actively have higher scores in the 5 variables. 4. TCP has a direct influence on PS while BA plays an intermediary role. It was found that the mediation effect of SA is not valid. 5. AC has no direct or indirect influence on PS. Conclusions: Age, educational background, and TCP (evaluation of the innovation characteristics of technology) play an important role in the final implementation of technology application behavior (BA), and the effective application of technology can indeed improve satisfaction with the medical services (PS)Tendo por base a teoria da Affordance, esta tese analisa duas dimensões desta teoria: a Affordance subjetiva (AS) e a Affordance comportamental (AC). A investigação tem por objetivo estudar a influência da Capacidade de Absorção (CA) e da Percepção das Características Tecnológicas (PCT) na AS e na AC dos pacientes estudados em relação à utilização da aplicação Wechat como plataforma de informação e fornecimento de serviços em Centros de Saúde, a fim de avaliar em que medida a AS e a AC influenciam a sua satisfação com os serviços médicos (SP). Os sujeitos do estudo são pacientes que utilizaram a aplicação WeChat na sua interação com Centros de Saúde. Foi administrado um questionário contendo quatro partes e um total de 44 questões em 28 destes centros localizados em 9 distritos da cidade de Cantão no sul da China. Os dados foram depois analisados tendo sido concebido um modelo com base nas 5 variáveis observadas (AS, AC, CA, PCT e PS). Resultados: 1. Dos 410 questionários distribuídos recolheram-se 400 dos quais 387 foram considerados válidos para análise; 2. Os resultados revelaram que existe uma diferença significativa entre os pacientes de diferentes idades e diferente formação académica; 3. O grupo de pacientes que mais utiliza a aplicação tem valores mais altos nas cinco variáveis analisadas; 4. A PCT tem uma influência direta na SP enquanto que a CA desempenha um papel mediador. Os resultados demonstraram ainda que o efeito moderador da AS não se verifica; 5. A AC não tem qualquer influência direta ou indireta na SP. Conclusões: A idade, a formação académica e a PCT (percepção das características inovadoras da tecnologia) desempenham um papel importante na Affordance Comportamental (AC) e a utilização efetiva da tecnologia pode contribuir para melhorar a satisfação dos pacientes com os serviços médicos (SP)

Design Principles for Engagement Platforms – Design Knowledge on Fostering Value Co-Creation

As the importance of services increases, so does the need for suitable information technology (IT) to support the exchange of resources in interactive value creation processes (co-creation). Engagement platforms (EPs) have been identified as a suitable IT solution, as they enable and foster value co-creation of heterogeneous actors. However, few guidelines exist on how to design for value co-creation on EPs. To address this problem, we employed the Design Science Research approach. We first conducted a literature review and then interviewed 24 experts from successful EP companies. As a result, we derived four design principles and evaluated them for further iterations. This study elaborates our findings and implications for practitioners and scholars seeking knowledge on how to design EPs resulting from three completed design cycles

Scaffolding reflective inquiry - enabling why-questioning while e-learning

This paper presents some theoretical and interdisciplinary perspectives that might inform the design and development of information and communications technology (ICT) tools to support reflective inquiry during e-learning. The role of why-questioning provides the focus of discussion and is guided by literature that spans critical thinking, inquiry-based and problem-based learning, storytelling, sense-making, and reflective practice, as well as knowledge management, information science, computational linguistics and automated question generation. It is argued that there exists broad scope for the development of ICT scaffolding targeted at supporting reflective inquiry duringe-learning. Evidence suggests that wiki-based learning tasks, digital storytelling, and e-portfolio tools demonstrate the value of accommodating reflective practice and explanatory content in supporting learning; however, it is also argued that the scope for ICT tools that directly support why-questioning as a key aspect of reflective inquiry is a frontier ready for development

Refusing Internment, Reclaiming Vitality, and Moving Past the Bargain Of Recognition: The Case of a Muslim Creative Counterpublic

The overarching goal of my project is to investigate the tactics of resistance and self-making available and picked up by those living on the receiving end of overbearing racializing structures. Actively listening to the formation and operation of a Muslim creative counterpublic called the Muslim Writers Collective (MWC) demonstrates that the analytics of self/social transformation available to racialized actors cannot simply be limited to ‘resistance’, understood as antagonist-oppositionality, and ‘transformation’, understood through the frame of recognition politics. The study of MWC draws on an ethnographic full-participant observation of two chapters - located in Toronto and New York City - in addition to 30 conversational interviews of performers, organizers, and attendees. For MWC regulars, comprised of racialized actors fielded to perpetually remain in quarantine and internment, expansion, revelation and mundanification emerge as powerful acts of refusal. Through communal storytelling, improvisation, and congregational experimentation, the altar of whiteness comes to be decentered, and a refusal of abjecthood and subalternity is collectively embodied. MWC fosters a space in which generative acts of refusal operate to engender an analytics of resistance and transformation prioritizing vitality and subjectivity. In consequence, actively rejecting the static, unidimensional, and reductive constructs of Muslimhood circulated in dominant racializing public(s). Hence, in contrast to the re-inscribing role of the corrective curations antagonist-recognition politics demands, MWC locates self/social transformation in the hazardous horizontal work of bearing witness to internal difference, in all its contradictions, incoherencies, and divergences, in order to ignite vitality as a congregation, as a Jama’ah

Understanding Coordination in the Information Systems Domain: Conceptualization and Implications

In this paper, we suggest a new conceptualization of coordination in the information systems (IS) domain. The conceptualization builds on neurobiological predispositions for coordinating actions. We assume that human evolution has led to the development of a neurobiological substrate that enables individuals to coordinate everyday actions. At heart, we discuss six activity modalities: contextualization, objectivation, spatialization, temporalization, stabilization, and transition. Specifically, we discuss that these modalities need to collectively function for successful coordination. To illustrate as much, we apply our conceptualization to important IS research areas, including project management and interface design. Generally, our new conceptualization holds value for coordination research on all four levels of analysis that we identified based on reviewing the IS literature (i.e., group, intra-organization, inter-organization, and IT artifact). In this way, our new approach, grounded in neurobiological findings, provides a high-level theory to explain coordination success or coordination failure and, hence, is independent from a specific level of analysis. From a practitioner’s perspective, the conceptualization provides a guideline for designing organizational interventions and IT artifacts. Because social initiatives are essential in multiple IS domains (e.g., software development, implementation of enterprise systems) and because the design of collaborative software tools is an important IS topic, this paper contributes to a fundamental phenomenon in the IS domain and does so from a new conceptual perspective

Patient-centered care process enabled by Integrative Social Media Platform in an outpatient setting

As an effort to guide patients toward being more informed and more involved as healthcare decision makers in the clinical processes, health care organizations have adopted a new technology referred to as an integrative social media platform (ISMP). This ISMP combines features of mobile technology and those of social media technology, integrating healthcare systems in order to support a more patient-centered healthcare process. However, users, both physicians and patients, have showed varied usages of ISMP, as a results, have shown mixed results of ISMP. To provide a better understanding of the use of ISMP, especially the interaction between patients and physicians, I turned to the concept of affordances. Affordances describe the possibilities for goal-oriented actions that a technical object offers to a user. Using a mixed-method approach with real archival event log data, conversation texts, documents, interview, and focus-group data from a large hospital which had adopted an ISMP, I confirmed three types of affordance: perceived affordance, behavioral affordance, and interactive affordance. I identified two key affordances of ISMP that lead to patient-centered care, namely ubiquitous access and virtual healthcare consultation, which represent a behavioral affordance and an interactive affordance, respectively. I also explored how different types of affordances are actualized and how they interact with each other to contribute to patient-centered care

The Bhāva Process: An Approach to Understanding the Process of Characterization in the Nāṭyaśāstra

Ph.D.Ph.D. Thesis. University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa 201