Refine
Year of publication
- 2015 (99) (remove)
Document Type
- Article (99) (remove)
Has Fulltext
- no (99) (remove)
Keywords
- Aphasie (1)
- Assessment (1)
- Bewegungsprofil (1)
- Big Data (1)
- Clinical handover (1)
- Connected Car (1)
- Diagnostik (1)
- Electronic Health Record (1)
- Elektronisches Kennzeichen (1)
- Evaluation (1)
Institute
Lifestyle-Logistik
(2015)
Background: Availability and usage of individual IT applications have been studied intensively in the past years. Recently, IT support of clinical processes is attaining increasing attention. The underlying construct that describes the IT support of clinical workflows is clinical information logistics. This construct needs to be better understood, operationalised and measured.
Objectives: It is therefore the aim of this study to propose and develop a workflow composite score (WCS) for measuring clinical information logistics and to examine its quality based on reliability and validity analyses.
Methods: We largely followed the procedural model of MacKenzie and colleagues (2011) for defining and conceptualising the construct domain, for developing the measurement instrument, assessing the content validity, pretesting the instrument, specifying the model, capturing the data and computing the WCS and testing the reliability and validity.
Results: Clinical information logistics was decomposed into the descriptors data and information, function, integration and distribution, which embraced the framework validated by an analysis of the international literature. This framework was refined selecting representative clinical processes. We chose ward rounds, pre- and post-surgery processes and discharge as sample processes that served as concrete instances for the measurements. They are sufficiently complex, represent core clinical processes and involve different professions, departments and settings. The score was computed on the basis of data from 183 hospitals of different size, ownership, location and teaching status. Testing the reliability and validity yielded encouraging results: the reliability was high with r(split-half) = 0.89, the WCS discriminated between groups; the WCS correlated significantly and moderately with two EHR models and the WCS received good evaluation results by a sample of chief information officers (n = 67). These findings suggest the further utilisation of the WCS.
Conclusion: As the WCS does not assume ideal workflows as a gold standard but measures IT support of clinical workflows according to validated descriptors a high portability of the WCS to other hospitals in other countries is very likely. The WCS will contribute to a better understanding of the construct clinical information logistics.
The demand for evidence-based health informatics and benchmarking of 'good' information systems in health care gives an opportunity to continue reporting on recent papers in the German journal GMS Medical Informatics, Biometry and Epidemiology (MIBE) here. The publications in focus deal with a comparison of benchmarking initiatives in German-speaking countries, use of communication standards in telemonitoring scenarios, the estimation of national cancer incidence rates and modifications of parametric tests. Furthermore papers in this issue of MIM are introduced which originally have been presented at the Annual Conference of the German Society of Medical Informatics, Biometry and Epidemiology. They deal as well with evidence and evaluation of 'good' information systems but also with data harmonization, surveillance in obstetrics, adaptive designs and parametrical testing in statistical analysis, patient registries and signal processing.