A conceptual analytics model for an outcome-driven quality management framework as part of professional healthcare education

BACKGROUND: Preparing the future health care professional workforce in a changing world is a significant undertaking. Educators and other decision makers look to evidence-based knowledge to improve quality of education. Analytics, the use of data to generate insights and support decisions, have been applied successfully across numerous application domains. Health care professional education is one area where great potential is yet to be realized. Previous research of Academic and Learning analytics has mainly focused on technical issues. The focus of this study relates to its practical implementation in the setting of health care education. OBJECTIVE: The aim of this study is to create a conceptual model for a deeper understanding of the synthesizing process, and transforming data into information to support educators’ decision making. METHODS: A deductive case study approach was applied to develop the conceptual model. RESULTS: The analytics loop works both in theory and in practice. The conceptual model encompasses the underlying data, the quality indicators, and decision support for educators. CONCLUSIONS: The model illustrates how a theory can be applied to a traditional data-driven analytics approach, and alongside the context- or need-driven analytics approach

Educating the educators: Incorporating bioinformatics into biological science education in Malaysia

Bioinformatics can be defined as a fusion of computational and biological sciences. The urgency to process and analyse the deluge of data created by proteomics and genomics studies has caused bioinformatics to gain prominence and importance. However, its multidisciplinary nature has created a unique demand for specialist trained in both biology and computing. In this review, we described the components that constitute the bioinformatics field and distinctive education criteria that are required to produce individuals with bioinformatics training. This paper will also provide an introduction and overview of bioinformatics in Malaysia. The existing bioinformatics scenario in Malaysia was surveyed to gauge its advancement and to plan for future bioinformatics education strategies. For comparison, we surveyed methods and strategies used in education by other countries so that lessons can be learnt to further improve the implementation of bioinformatics in Malaysia. It is believed that accurate and sufficient steerage from the academia and industry will enable Malaysia to produce quality bioinformaticians in the future

Rebordering the borders created by multidisciplinary sciences: A study

Emergence of “Glass ceiling” like phenomena in the minds of professionals doing research in a multidisciplinary subject needs to be studied. For an example, computational neurosciences(CNS) comprises of neurology, cognitive science, psychology, computer science, physics, mathematics, information technology, radiology, anthropology, sociology, and biology. When a specialist doing research in a multidisciplinary science like computational neuroscience, know less about other disciplines. This at times leads to tension among the members of the multidisciplinary group. This may create an environment where some members feel excluded. This may also lead to a power structure among different professionals. In case of CNS, the biological scientists feel the computational and engineering sciences may use their mathematical power to control them. On the other hand the engineering scientists feel they need to learn more about biology to understand CNS. The highly technical medical specialist such as Electro physiologists were also feeling like the biologists. As computational neurosciences gaining more importance, it is important to understand the interaction among the scientists from different disciplines and its effect on the development of discipline. The present paper is an attempt to study the dynamics of the members of the multidisciplinary group, who have done their short course on CNS.Multidisciplinary Research, Computational Neuroscience, interaction, education, research

Clinical governance, education and learning to manage health information

Purpose – This paper aims to suggest that the concept of clinical governance goes beyond a bureaucratic accountability structure and can be viewed as a negotiated balance between imperfectly aligned and sometimes conflicting goals within a complex adaptive system. On this view, the information system cannot be separated conceptually from the system of governance it supports or the people whose work it facilitates or hinders. Design/methodology/approach – The study, located within the English National Health Service (NHS) between 1999 and 2005, is case study based using a multi method approach to data collection within two primary care organisations (PCOs). The research strategy is conducted within a social constructionist ontological perspective. Findings – The findings reflect the following broad-based themes: mutual adjustment of a plurality of stakeholder perceptions, preferences and priorities; the development of information and communication systems, empowered by informatics; an emphasis on education and training to build capacity and capability. Research limitations/implications – Limitations of case study methodology include a tendency to provide selected accounts. These are potentially biased and risk trivialising findings. Rooted in specific context, their generalisability to other contexts is limited by the extent to which contexts are similar. Reasonable attempts were made to minimise any bias. The diversity of data collection methods used in the study was an attempt to counterbalance the limitations highlighted in one method by strength from alternative techniques. Practical implications – The paper makes recommendations in two key governance areas: education and learning to manage health information. In practice, the lessons learned provide opportunities to inform future approaches to health informatics educational programmes. Originality/value – With regard to topicality, it is suggested that many of the developmental issues highlighted during the establishment of quality improvement programmes within primary care organisations (PCGs/PCTs) are relevant in the light of current NHS reforms and move towards commissioning consortia

Investing in People

Foundations have long created programs to provide grants to individuals—most often in the form of fellowships, scholarships, and prizes. Several of these programs have become so prominent that they are now institutions in and of themselves. Consider just a few examples: the Pulitzer Prize, Fulbright Program, and MacArthur "genius" awards. Governments, as well as foundations large and small, fund individual support programs.The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation has generously allowed the authors of this report to examine its portfolio of individual support programs to explore what the authors believe are some of the strategic fundamentals underlying this type of programming that could be applied to future individual support grantmaking. The purpose of this study is to inform those interested in individual support programs about not only some of the strategy considerations underlying this type of grantmaking but what these programs can be expected to achieve—and under what circumstances.

Advances in Teaching & Learning Day Abstracts 2005

Proceedings of the Advances in Teaching & Learning Day Regional Conference held at The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston in 2005

Applications and Uses of Dental Ontologies

The development of a number of large-scale semantically-rich ontologies for biomedicine attests to the interest of life science researchers and clinicians in Semantic Web technologies. To date, however, the dental profession has lagged behind other areas of biomedicine in developing a commonly accepted, standardized ontology to support the representation of dental knowledge and information. This paper attempts to identify some of the potential uses of dental ontologies as part of an effort to motivate the development of ontologies for the dental domain. The identified uses of dental ontologies include support for advanced data analysis and knowledge discovery capabilities, the implementation of novel education and training technologies, the development of information exchange and interoperability solutions, the better integration of scientific and clinical evidence into clinical decision-making, and the development of better clinical decision support systems. Some of the social issues raised by these uses include the ethics of using patient data without consent, the role played by ontologies in enforcing compliance with regulatory criteria and legislative constraints, and the extent to which the advent of the Semantic Web introduces new training requirements for dental students. Some of the technological issues relate to the need to extract information from a variety of resources (for example, natural language texts), the need to automatically annotate information resources with ontology elements, and the need to establish mappings between a variety of existing dental terminologies

Recent developments in chemoinformatics education

Chemoinformatics techniques are increasingly being used to analyse the huge volumes of chemical and biological data resulting from combinatorial synthesis and high-throughput screening programmes. Scientists with both the chemical and the computing skills required to carry out such analyses are currently in very short supply, this resulting in the establishment of MSc programmes for the training of chemoinformatics specialists