Information Systems and Health Care VIII-Using Paper-Based Scenarios to Examine Perceptions of Interactive Health Communication Systems

While information and communication technologies can increase the health care provided to underserved populations, research concerning these technologies often involves only those patients who possess access to technology or who are otherwise willing and able to use it. This issue is important for both researchers and practitioners because non-users\u27 beliefs may not only be different from users\u27 beliefs, they may become more important to understand as access to technology increases. To address this problem: 1. We develop a model of the antecedents to perceived usefulness of an interactive health communication (IHC) system. While our research model combines health-related beliefs with technology perceptions, the antecedents can all be measured before an individual has contact with a particular IHC system. Thus, in the current (and in future) work, they can be used to assess the beliefs of individuals who may not currently be willing or able to use technology. 2. We test this model using paper-based scenarios that depict hypothetical interactions with an IHC system. These paper-based scenarios are more flexible and easier to use than a working system, thus we are able to obtain data from many sources, resulting in a perceptually diverse sample. Results of our hypothesis testing show that patients with higher knowledge and discipline are less likely than those with less knowledge and/or discipline to find an IHC system useful. In addition we learned several lessons from our research process including how to increase participation rates and what reactions to expect from participants

Green Business and Online Price Premiums: Will Consumers Pay More to Purchase from Environmentally Friendly Technology Companies?

This study explores the “green” business model for the digital economy. Specifically, it asks whether online consumers will pay more to purchase from a company that they perceive to be socially responsible when it comes to the environment. We conduct an experiment where consumers are presented with different facts regarding the environmental practices of a fictional online retailer of digital music, movies and MP3 players, and are then asked to indicate the maximum price they would be willing to pay for these products. Each consumer first reacts to an environmentally neutral company, followed by an environmentally friendly company and an environmentally unfriendly company presented in a random order. Results show a significant difference between the maximum prices consumers are willing to pay for products with each group, with the environmentally friendly company receiving a modest premium over the neutral group and with the environmentally unfriendly company experiencing a steep price drop for their products compared to the neutral group where many consumers indicate that they would not purchase at any price from the environmentally unfriendly company. Our findings have practical implications for the digital economy as companies look for ways to differentiate themselves from competitors

Mitigating Selective Filtering’s Polarizing Effect on Web 2.0 Content

For almost two decades, the Internet and related technologies have made more information available to information usersthan they can handle. The decentralization of content creation that is a feature of Web 2.0 has only exacerbated this problem.This state of overload, combined with our tendency toward hypothesis-confirming behavior, can result in biased informationselection, and threatens both civil discourse and effective decision-making. In this paper, we describe a study of a techniquedesigned to mitigate filtering by enabling content consumers to see a greater diversity of information. The results of ourexperiment support the notion that the strength of people’s opinions can be changed by reading relevant information, butprovide only weak support for the effectiveness of categorizing information content. We discuss how the results will guideour future research and inform theory and practice

An Experimental Investigation of the Individual and Joint Effects of Financial and Non-financial Incentives on Knowledge Sharing Using Enterprise Social Media

Many organizations implement enterprise social media (ESM) in an effort to capture and store valuable knowledge that employees possess. Unfortunately, more often than not, employees do not make a large number of knowledge contributions. Using agency theory and contingency theory as foundations, we examine managerial interventions that can improve knowledge contribution rates in ESM. Specifically, we investigate the individual and joint effects of paying people to share knowledge, providing social cues, and having supporting and policing moderators on knowledge sharing. We further examine how two contingency factors—the nature of an employee’s compensation scheme (variable or fixed) for their primary work task and the employee’s belief about the importance of sharing knowledge—affect the relative efficacy of the aforementioned managerial interventions. Although we found evidence that being paid to share knowledge and believing that knowledge sharing is inherently important both increase the amount of knowledge shared, our most important results concern the existence of significant interaction effects. For persons who receive a fixed salary, we found a surprisingly large, positive synergistic effect between being paid to share knowledge and believing that knowledge sharing is important. However, introducing a policing moderator almost completely nullified this synergistic effect. We discuss the implications of these findings for both practice and research

M.M.: Facilitator Notes

Video interviews of five chronic pain patients with differing conditions were completed; a man with chronic low back pain, a woman with fibromyalgia, a woman with rheumatoid arthritis, a man with musculoskeletal pain in addition to post-traumatic stress disorder, and a woman with a spinal cord injury. These interviews were used to make personal videos for each patient, which tell their story of chronic pain, and a longer 8-10 minute video that included all patients in addition to a young woman with complex regional pain syndrome (CRPS). They were also used to make interprofessional case reports of chronic pain with facilitator notes for each patient. All of the materials created (videos, case reports, and facilitator notes) were presented and used for educating health professional students at the 11th Annual UNE Interprofessional Education Spring Symposium: The Science of Pain and the Art of Healing

R.F.: Facilitator Notes

Video interviews of five chronic pain patients with differing conditions were completed; a man with chronic low back pain, a woman with fibromyalgia, a woman with rheumatoid arthritis, a man with musculoskeletal pain in addition to post-traumatic stress disorder, and a woman with a spinal cord injury. These interviews were used to make personal videos for each patient, which tell their story of chronic pain, and a longer 8-10 minute video that included all patients in addition to a young woman with complex regional pain syndrome (CRPS). They were also used to make interprofessional case reports of chronic pain with facilitator notes for each patient. All of the materials created (videos, case reports, and facilitator notes) were presented and used for educating health professional students at the 11th Annual UNE Interprofessional Education Spring Symposium: The Science of Pain and the Art of Healing

R.F.: A Case Report of Musculoskeletal Pain

Video interviews of five chronic pain patients with differing conditions were completed; a man with chronic low back pain, a woman with fibromyalgia, a woman with rheumatoid arthritis, a man with musculoskeletal pain in addition to post-traumatic stress disorder, and a woman with a spinal cord injury. These interviews were used to make personal videos for each patient, which tell their story of chronic pain, and a longer 8-10 minute video that included all patients in addition to a young woman with complex regional pain syndrome (CRPS). They were also used to make interprofessional case reports of chronic pain with facilitator notes for each patient. All of the materials created (videos, case reports, and facilitator notes) were presented and used for educating health professional students at the 11th Annual UNE Interprofessional Education Spring Symposium: The Science of Pain and the Art of Healing

M.M.: A Case Report of Spinal Cord Injury

Video interviews of five chronic pain patients with differing conditions were completed; a man with chronic low back pain, a woman with fibromyalgia, a woman with rheumatoid arthritis, a man with musculoskeletal pain in addition to post-traumatic stress disorder, and a woman with a spinal cord injury. These interviews were used to make personal videos for each patient, which tell their story of chronic pain, and a longer 8-10 minute video that included all patients in addition to a young woman with complex regional pain syndrome (CRPS). They were also used to make interprofessional case reports of chronic pain with facilitator notes for each patient. All of the materials created (videos, case reports, and facilitator notes) were presented and used for educating health professional students at the 11th Annual UNE Interprofessional Education Spring Symposium: The Science of Pain and the Art of Healing

A Protocol Processing Architecture for Networked Multimedia Computers

Multimedia workstation architectures differ from current architecture in these respects – they have multiple specialized processing units, a high speed I/O interconnect mechanism, a high speed broadband network interface and a real-tie multitasking operating systems (OS) that provides QoS guarantees. These systems will primarily be used to run distributed applications that require high network throughput and predictable delay and delay jitter for real-time traffic. We argue the need for a different protocol organization and processing architecture in order to achieve this. We show how the emerging hardware architecture and OS structures favor a “decentralized protocol processing” approach, that takes advantage of the data delivery mechanism provided by the hardware to improve in-band (protocol data) processing, and the sophisticated OS mechanisms based on communicating objects to improve the out-of-band (control) processing. We discuss the need for providing end-to-end QoS guarantees for applications and discuss how it can be naturally incorporated in the proposed architecture