Healthcare Informatics Research And Innovation Essay
Include intro, a currently emerging healthcare technology system, goals for the product, data supporting the product, healthcare settings (including education), conclusion.
You should carry out an investigation about one of the technologies used in Health Informatics, for example: EHR, CPOE, EMR, CDSS, eMAR, or electronic devices used in Health Care
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5 pages (excluding cover and reference pages)Healthcare Informatics Research And Innovation Essay
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Health information technology (health IT) is an emerging interdisciplinary research field that brings innovative and unique opportunities as well as challenges for information systems (IS) researchers. Public Health Informatics (PHI) is an important subdomain of health IT but yet extensively studied by IS researchers. The limited IS literature on PHI surveillance, especially on regulatory science opens new gates for IS researchers to test existing and develop new theories, to design and configure innovative methods and models, and to provide practical health managerial insights. The emerging information technology innovations provide novel insights and opportunities to improve public health surveillance. Specifically, social media analytics and intelligence, broadly accepted and applied in the current IS domains, has motivated a new branch of research in regulatory science that may bear prolific fruits both in theoretical and pragmatic perspectives. This dissertation seeks to address the problem and fills the research gaps by proposing a systematic research framework for regulatory science surveillance using social media-driven approaches. Five essays in the design science paradigm are developed. Essay I aims to provide a basic understanding of social media user-generated content on regulated products by text mining and social network analysis techniques. User-generated content can further motivate research on the user level. Essay II takes this perspective and models user features based on text.Healthcare Informatics Research And Innovation Essay Essay III focuses on another important feature of social media – network structures, and develops a computational algorithm for large-scale social network analysis on modeling social influence. After proposing innovative IS solutions to real regulatory public health problems, essay IV endeavors to validate the use of social media datasets by combining survey and social media data for data triangulation. Finally, essay V, motivated by the keyword-based social media data collection processes, strives to automatically and accurately detect sensitive regulated product street names, utilizing rich text information in the ever-changing linguistic environment on social media. Beyond the practical insights of health decision support and solutions provided in each essay, this dissertation offers a systematic social media-driven regulatory science informatics research paradigm to guide future PHI and other analytical IS research.Healthcare Informatics Research And Innovation Essay
Introduction Health informatics is the bridging of computer science, information and the health care field. This interdisciplinary field can be applied to a range of medical fields such as nursing, biomedicine, medicine and subspecialties such as immunology (immunoinformatics). Informatics not only has roles to play in day-to-day areas of immunology such as data storage/retrieval, decision support, standards and electronic health care records but also in research and education such as data mining and simulation systems (Coiera, 2002). Informatics and more specifically, health informatics first started being used in in the late 1950s with the rise of computers (Ho, 2010). Technologies such as computers allowed practitioners and researches
Decision support systems are ideally interactive systems that allow the decision making physician to come to the conclusion based on a host of information pulled from data bases, personal knowledge, predesigned modals etc. Decision support systems have many benefits such as; patient-time efficiency, speed up process of decision making, promotes learning and training, reveals new approaches in thought process, generates new evidence in support of a decision and encourages exploration and discovery of the decision maker (Bosworth, York, Kotansky, & Berman, 2011). Although these systems require end user expertise, correct inputs and appropriate modals, they also require vast and exstenive information. Immunoinformatics are used to compile vast amounts of data for the immunology field (De Groot A. , Immunomics: discovering new targets for vaccines and therapeutics , 2006). This data includes genetic mapping, protein structures, cytometry data and many other data pools needed by immunologists to make correct decisions.Healthcare Informatics Research And Innovation Essay
Understanding the intellectual structure of health informatics is crucial to the whole
health informatics community. In general, the intellectual structure of a discipline bespeaks the
topics and paradigms selected by a field, the research themes that emerge over time, the thought
leaders who direct the efforts of its various research programs, and the relationships between
various structural components. Gaining deep insights into the intellectual structure of a
discipline can lead to defining moments for a community of scholars (Kuhn 1962). Whereas this
structure often reifies what is already known in the knowledge base or else increments (Kuhn
1962), it can also shape the epistemologies that frame knowledge development work and alter
the philosophical basis of these efforts (Crane 1972). Structural knowledge can help scholars set
their future research directions by seeing patterns of work that have existed in the past and noting
trend lines into the future (Platt 1964).Healthcare Informatics Research And Innovation Essay
Although in-depth intellectual structure analyses have been conducted for the entire field
of information systems (IS) in journals such as MIS Quarterly and Management Science (Culnan
1986; Culnan 1987), IS research intellectual structure analyses are notably lacking in the
growing discipline of health informatics (HI) and its sub-discipline health information
technology (HIT). Given that HI literature reviews and citation analyses have been conducted in
HI journals and the HIT literature has been reviewed in information systems (IS) journals
(Chiasson and Davidson 2004; Gallivan and Tao 2014; Raghupathi and Nerur 2010; Romanow
et al. 2012), such articles are either becoming dated (especially in the case of many HI analyses)
and/or use only one primary method (e.g., citation analysis, social network analysis, or latent
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semantic analysis). We contend that future progress is dependent on: (1) a more complete
understanding of how the HI and HIT disciplines have grown and evolved in the context of IS
research over the past two decades, (2) multi-method analyses of the structural relationships
between and cohesion of research themes and thought leaders (we use citation and co-citation
analysis, social network analysis, and latent semantic analysis), and (3) leveraging these
intellectual structure analyses to guide future research.
The first essay of the current dissertation represents such an effort of more recent, more
complete, and more thorough analyses of HI and, particularly, HIT intellectual structures.
Deeper understanding of the evolving intellectual structures of HI and HIT provides a means by
which to further expand, consolidate, and renew the discipline in a systemic and informed
manner while also theoretically contributing back to coordinate and reference disciplines. Given
that an in-depth intellectual structural analysis of HIT focused on research in top IS journals had
not appeared before our study, we fill an important research gap in this essay. Using the multiple
statistical methods including citation and co-citation analysis, social network analysis (SNA),Healthcare Informatics Research And Innovation Essay
and latent semantic analysis (LSA), we show how HIT research has emerged in IS journals and
distinguished itself from the larger HI context.
The second essay of the current dissertation zooms in one specific emerging HIT research
theme, online health communities, which are defined as social networks where people with
common health interests can share experiences, request questions, seek or provide emotional
support (Eysenbach et al. 2004). A 2011 national survey conducted in the U.S. by the Pew
Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project found that 80% of U.S. Internet users have
looked for health information online, 34% of Internet users have read others’ commentary or
experience about health issues online, and 18% have sought online to find others with similar
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health concerns (Fox 2011). A more recent national survey by the same project found that 72%
of U.S. Internet users have looked online for health information within the past year (Fox and
Duggan 2013). Another survey showed that social media sites are emerging as a potential source
of online health information, with 42% Internet users consulting online rankings or reviews and
32% using social networking sites for health (Thackeray et al. 2013). These statistics suggest
that online health communities, or the Internet in general, are becoming a common source for
health information seeking. As an inseparable part of the personalized preventative medicine
(Swan 2012), online health communities are changing the way patients treat and/or manage their
health.Healthcare Informatics Research And Innovation Essay
Two major purposes of participants joining online health communities are to seek health
information regarding self-management options and to receive emotional support by knowing
that their peers care (Hajli et al. 2014). People can discuss conditions, symptoms, and treatments
as well as seek and provide health-related advice and emotional support from each other.
Moreover, advanced services such as posing questions to physicians, quantified self-tracking of
health conditions, and clinical trials access can also be provided to consumers (Swan 2009).
When individuals are sharing their personal health information with other online community
peers, they are “crowdsourcing” the collective wisdom of a huge number of community members
(Eysenbach 2008). This can significantly lower the cost of health care and alleviate burdens on
the health care system. Ultimately, online health communities open up new opportunities for the
health care industry to obtain the “triple aim” (Berwick et al. 2008, p. 760) including: (1) cutting
costs, (2) enhancing the individual’s experience of care, and (3) improving the health of
populations. The wide use of online health communities leads naturally to the need to better
understand the social relations in this context.Healthcare Informatics Research And Innovation Essay
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The rise of health social networks such as PatientsLikeMe, DailyStrength, and MedHelp
provides unique opportunities for research focusing on healthcare decision support and patient
empowerment (Miller 2012). User-generated content on these online communities is accessible
not only to the patients and caregivers but also researchers. Specifically, digital trace data on the
online communities are available for scholars to better address more complicated research
questions proposed. Digital trace data are records of activities that are undertaken through an
online information systems (Howison et al. 2011). Here, a trace represents an event occurred in
the past. Following proper and rigorous ways, digital trace data can be used to measure
theoretically interesting constructs (Howison et al. 2011). With the abundant big digital trace
data being generated by online health communities, scholars are able to obtain insights into
highly detailed, contextualized, and rich contexts, thereby obtaining insights that address the
heterogeneous needs of individual patients. However, there is a lack of research in IS field that
empirically addresses this phenomenon and its underlying theoretical relationships via analyses
of big health data.
The second essay of the dissertations tends to fill such knowledge gap by probing the
impact of social support provided and consumed in online health communities on individual
health promotion outcomes through the analyses of big online health digital trace data.Healthcare Informatics Research And Innovation Essay
Contributions of this research not only extend current understanding of micro-mechanisms of
social support exchange in online health communities as well as the catalytic role of social
support in health promoting, but also shed light on the design and management of such online
health communities.
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1.2 Scope of Inquiry
This dissertation follows the multi-paper model and is comprised of two separate essays
that respectively investigate: (1) the intellectual structure of the discipline health informatics (HI)
and its sub-discipline health information technology (HIT), and (2) an emerging and interesting
area of HIT research that explores the impact of social support on health promotion outcomes in
online health communities. Table 1.1 summarizes the key characteristics of the two essays.Healthcare Informatics Research And Innovation Essay
Table 1.1 Summary of Two Essays
Research
Design
Essay 1: Intellectual Structure
of Health Informatics
Essay 2: Online Health
Communities
Research Topic
Intellectual structure of health
informatics discipline
The effect of social support on health
promotion outcomes
Data Source Archival data Digital trace data
Raw Data
Volume
24,897 health informatics
papers
324 health information
technology articles
2,305,288 online discussion posts
238,617 threads
32,405 members
Analytical
Method
Citation analysis
Co-citation analysis
Social network analysis
(SNA)
Latent semantic analysis
(LSA)
Cluster analysis
Natural language processing
(NLP)
Latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA)
Support vector machine (SVM)
Unified medical language system
(UMLS)
Social network analysis (SNA)
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CHAPTER 2
THE EVOLVING INTELLECTUAL STRUCTURE OF THE HEALTH
INFORMATICS DISCIPLINE: A MULTI-METHOD INVESTIGATION OF
A RAPIDLY-GROWING SCIENTIFIC FIELD1
Abstract
Scientific disciplines are self-defined and self-evolving to a large extent, but
acknowledging that disciplines develop organically does not diminish the continuing need to
more fully understand the underlying dynamics of their intellectual structures. Intellectual
structures bespeak the topics (including paradigms) that a discipline selects, the sub-disciplines Healthcare Informatics Research And Innovation Essay
and sub-communities that emerge, the thought leaders who direct the efforts of its various
research programs, and the relationships between these various structural components. One such
discipline, the discipline of health informatics (HI), is not only a vitally important discipline for
societies worldwide, but is also an enormous field that manifests itself in the natural and social
sciences as well as in the information systems (IS) and applied disciplines including
professionals such as physicians, nurses, paramedics, and so forth.
A subset of the HI field especially important to IS scholars is identified here as health
information technology (HIT). The current study analyzes the intellectual underpinnings of the
field of HI and, in particular, focuses on its sub-discipline HIT. Using the multiple statistical
methods including citation and co-citation analysis, social network analysis (SNA), and latent
semantic analysis (LSA), we show how HIT research has emerged in IS journals and
1 Chen, L., Baird, A., and Straub, D. 2015. “The Evolving Intellectual Structure of the Health Informatics Discipline:
A Multi-Method Investigation of a Rapidly-Growing Scientific Field,” Working Paper, Georgia State University.
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distinguished itself from the larger HI context. The research themes, intellectual leadership,
cohesion of these themes and networks of researchers, and journal presence revealed in our
longitudinal intellectual structure analyses foretell how, in particular, these HI and HIT fields
have evolved to date and also how they could evolve in the future. Our findings identify which
research streams are central (versus peripheral) and which are cohesive (as opposed to disparate).
Suggestions for vibrant areas of future research emerge from our analyses.Healthcare Informatics Research And Innovation Essay
Keywords: health informatics (HI); health information technology (HIT); intellectual structure;
social network analysis (SNA); citation analysis; co-citation analysis; latent semantic
analysis (LSA)
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2.1 Introduction
A discipline or field of study is a community of scholars and teachers who develop
expertise in a self-defined domain of knowledge (Abbott 1988). A discipline is distinguished, in
part, by the power that this group exercises over expert matter, the more abstract term for such a
community being a “profession” (Abbott 1988). Combining the terms leads us to the concept of
an academic professional discipline which lays claim to knowledge in particular intellectual
domains. Intellectual knowledge within domains grows and evolves over time, often in an
organic manner, as geographically and temporally dispersed research is conducted by researchers
who may or may not be familiar with the published, forthcoming, and/or ongoing works of
others. Therefore, an “intellectual structure” underlying a discipline develops over time, as
research topics, themes, and thought leaders emerge (and cohere and/or fragment), but the
underlying structure between these elements is often difficult to identify without comprehensive
analyses.
While in-depth intellectual structure analyses have been conducted for the entire field of
information systems (IS) in journals such as MIS Quarterly and Management Science (Culnan
1986; Culnan 1987), IS research intellectual structure analyses are notably lacking in the
growing discipline of health informatics (HI) and its sub-discipline health information
technology (HIT). Granted, HI literature reviews and citation analyses have been conducted in
HI journals and the HIT literature has been reviewed in IS journals (see Table 2.1 for a
summary), but such articles are either becoming dated (especially in the case of many HI
analyses) and/or use only one primary method (e.g., citation analysis, social network analysis, or
latent semantic analysis). We contend that future progress is dependent on: (1) a more complete
understanding of how the HI and HIT disciplines have grown and evolved in the context of IS Healthcare Informatics Research And Innovation Essay
9
research over the past two decades (our data span January 1992 to April of 2013), (2) multimethod analyses of the structural relationships between and cohesion of research themes and
thought leaders (we use citation and co-citation analysis, social network analysis, and latent
semantic analysis), and (3) leveraging these intellectual structure analyses to guide future
research. Therefore, we contribute a more recent, more complete, and more thorough analysis of
HI and, particularly, HIT intellectual structures.
The intellectual structure of a discipline bespeaks the topics (including paradigms)
selected by a field, the themes that emerge, the thought leaders who direct the efforts of its
various research programs, and the relationships between various structural components.
Gaining deep insights into the intellectual structure of a discipline can lead to defining moments
for a community of scholars (Kuhn 1962). Whereas this structure often reifies what is already
known in the knowledge base or else increments (Kuhn 1962), it can also shape the
epistemologies that frame knowledge development work and alter the philosophical basis of
these efforts (Crane 1972). Structural knowledge can help scholars set their future research
directions by seeing patterns of work that have existed in the past and noting trend lines into the
future (Platt 1964).
Many authors see intellectual structures as a critical aspect of the history of a field,
specifically, in this case, an intellectual history (Abbott 1999; Grafton 2006). Understanding the
intellectual development of a discipline is of great importance for researchers in that it allows
them to more effectively conduct studies based on prior research (Culnan 1986; Platt 1964). It
can also aid in identifying gaps in the literature and subsequently forging research projects or
programs that address these gaps (Platt 1964).Healthcare Informatics Research And Innovation Essay
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Studies of intellectual structures are likely a sub-dimension of a larger set of studies of
how professional disciplines evolve. Some might even frame this as the sociology of a scientific
discipline since intellectual structure studies examine how groups establish their identity and the
social activities through which they establish their legitimacy (DeSanctis 2003). When they
focus on knowledge creation and dissemination, they ask and answer questions about the “who”
and “why” of the main research themes of the discipline. But, they can be broader in their vision,
such as the current IS history initiative taken on by the Association for Information Systems
(AIS) professional society, i.e., to create a record of historical artifacts about the discipline and
how it has developed (see, for example, Abbott 1999). Intellectual scholarly activities are an
important part of this overall story, but they are not the entire substance. The goal in the case of
IS is, as articulated by Hirschheim et al. (2012):
We believe that a study of the history of the IS discipline can foster understanding of
where the discipline of IS has come from, what has happened in the discipline, and how
the discipline has evolved to the position it is in today (page ii).
Clearly, the choice of discipline that is the focus of a structural study can be of equally
great pertinence. Most people would place a premium on the history of nuclear physics over the
history of basket-weaving even though the latter likely says a lot about changing cultural values
and economics. For this reason, we are focusing the current study on the information systems
that are heavily impacting health and healthcare in contemporary societies.
One hardly needs to argue for the criticality of healthcare (and thus healthcare studies)Healthcare Informatics Research And Innovation Essay
today. Healthcare budgets are soaring worldwide (Moses et al. 2013) and there appears to be no
end in sight. Moreover, sizeable percentages of GDPs internationally are being absorbed by the
delivery and consumption of healthcare products and services. Globally in 2013, healthcare was
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estimated at a rate in the range of 7-18% of GDP in nearly all developed economies, a rate that,
in general, is climbing every year (Martin et al. 2014; OECD 2013). What is particularly
disturbing about such trends is that even though the use of HIT seems to lead to better health
outcomes (Garg et al. 2005; Jones et al. 2014) and may be able to lower the soaring costs of
healthcare (Hillestad et al. 2005), HIT implementation barriers can be high (Jha et al. 2009).
Given the importance of this profession and discipline, and the need for a better
understanding of the intellectual structures of HI and HIT in the context of IS research, we focus
our efforts generally on the intellectual structure of HI and more specifically on the field of HIT.
In the field of HIT in particular, research methods and citation trends have been reviewed
(Chiasson and Davidson 2004; Gallivan and Tao 2014; Romanow et al. 2012), but
comprehensive research on authorial and thematic leadership has not been fully addressed,
leaving a research gap for both understanding the whole view of the HIT community and
evaluating scholars and topics in this sub-discipline. Therefore, our main research questions are:
RQ1: What is the intellectual structure of the entire field of HI?
RQ2: What is the emerging intellectual structure of the HIT sub-discipline?Healthcare Informatics Research And Innovation Essay
…including, in RQ2: (a) which HIT themes have been popular over time and what
thematic shifts been observed over time; (b) which themes are the most prestigious, the
most cohesive, and the most mature, both from the standpoint of content and networks of
thought leaders; and (c) who are the intellectual leaders of the entire domain and the
sub-domains?
The organization of this paper follows the standard format. First, we review the extant
literature regarding intellectual structures and hone in on the HI and HIT literatures. This review
will show the gaps in our current knowledge base about the intellectual leaders and the abiding
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topics in these fields. Our sampling and multi-methodological techniques, which include: (1)
social network analysis (SNA), (2) variant forms of citation and co-citation analysis, and (3)
latent semantic analysis (LSA), are then described, followed by data analysis. The paper
concludes with observations about the state of the HIT field and areas that appear to be most
fruitful for future work. Our multi-method approach to uncovering the nature of the HI
discipline and its sub-discipline HIT yields vital information for academic research and theory
development.Healthcare Informatics Research And Innovation Essay
2.2 Distinctions, Definitions, and Background
2.2.1 Disciplinary Distinctions
What is a discipline? While we might wish to conceptualize a discipline such as HI as a
well-defined, bounded body of knowledge, distinct from other disciplines, reality is of course
much more complex. Abbott (2001) uses a fractal distinctions model of disciplinary
development to show that the boundaries between academic disciplines are amorphous and
ephemeral; this notwithstanding, many disciplines have an “axis of cohesion” (p. 144). When
fields attempt to shift and up-scope their domain of interest, he argues that they inevitably move
beyond their traditional boundaries and seek out interdisciplinary intellectual spaces. A novel
interdisciplinary focus can share interests and paradigms from originating disciplines, but the
point from which individual scholars start (i.e., their originating disciplines) dramatically affects
how they ultimately position their interdisciplinary work. Rather than clarifying themselves
through refinements, disciplines are continually fragmenting across thought and method.
Equilibrium and stability are not possible because of fractation.Healthcare Informatics Research And Innovation Essay