4,265 research outputs found

    Quality Assurance Based Healthcare Information System Design

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    Despite decades of research, health information systems have been characterised by cost over-runs, poor specifications and lack of user uptake. We propose an alternative approach to their design. By viewing health care as a process and quality as continuously seeking iterative improvements to processes, an objectoriented analysis reveals a class model, which supports quality assurance (QA). At the heart of the model is the ability to store actions for comparison with intentions. Measurement of the proportion of planned tasks that are executed provides a basis for identifying when to alter a process. We show that the model is able to represent medical and administrative procedures and argue that it forms an electronic record suitable for health care organisations. Were this record to become a standard, software could be developed close to the point of use, in harmony with the needs of stakeholders, so avoiding many criticisms of health information systems

    On Quality and Communication: The Relevance of Critical Theory to Health Informatics

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    Health information systems require long-term investment before they provide a socio-economic return, yet their implementation remains problematic, possibly because the claims made about them appear not to sit well with healthcare professionals’ practice. Health informatics should address these issues from a sound conceptual base, such as might be provided by critical theory, which seeks to identify hidden assumptions and ideologies. This discipline can provide a better understanding of the inner workings of socio-technical systems, with a view to improving them through the promotion of emancipation (allowing people to fulfill their potential). Critical theory can also shed light on the problems with health information systems and offer insight into remedies, for example, by relating Habermas’ theories about communication to feedback, a concept central to quality assurance (QA). Such analysis finds that QA’s principal practices can be interpreted as emancipatory but requires organizations to substantially change their behavior. An alternate approach is to install health information systems designed to support QA. Applying critical theory to these systems shows that they could become an active part of service delivery rather than static repositories of data, because they may encourage standardized conversations between all stakeholders about the important features of health care. Success will depend on access for all participants to data entry and analysis tools, integration with work practice, and use by staff and management in QA. These ideas offer new directions for research into and the development of health information systems. The next step will be to implement them and observe their technical and emancipatory properties

    Citations and Readership are Poor Indicators of Research Excellence: Introducing TrueImpactDataset, a New Dataset for Validating Research Evaluation Metrics

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    In this paper we show that citation counts and Mendeley readership are poor indicators of research excellence. Our experimental design builds on the assumption that a good evaluation metric should be able to distinguish publications that have changed a research field from those that have not. The experiment has been conducted on a new dataset for bibliometric research which we call TrueImpactDataset. TrueImpactDataset is a collection of research publications of two types -- research papers which are considered seminal work in their area and papers which provide a survey (a literature review) of a research area. The dataset also contains related metadata, which include DOIs, titles, authors and abstracts. We describe how the dataset was built and provide overview statistics of the dataset. We propose to use the dataset for validating research evaluation metrics. By using this data, we show that widely used research metrics only poorly distinguish excellent research
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