Impact of contextual metadata on the perceived effectiveness and efficiency of team coordination processes in healthcare operations
Abstract
In order to cope with recent economic and legislative changes in the United States, hospitals, clinics, pharmacies, and other healthcare facilities have entered multi-unit coordination agreements that have increased their organizational complexity. This dissertation focuses on the clinical operations' coordination issue within and across teams of healthcare experts. Recent research efforts have examined system-of-systems modeling as a framework for describing organizational processes and functions over time. Other research has emphasized how healthcare experts interact individually with innovative health information technologies (HITs). This dissertation emphasizes the capabilities and processes of the communication links that connect healthcare professionals. Rather than looking at specific HITs, this dissertation studies the user requirements of effective and efficient knowledge-sharing protocols that allow providers to share a variety of information and resources. One of the objectives of this research is to evaluate the gaps between provider needs during processes of knowledge sharing, and the capabilities and usage of available information. This dissertation examines perceptions of the flow of resources and information by healthcare experts, as affected by situation and timing constraints. Because those requirements change within and across healthcare teams, this dissertation defines and examines how perceptions of context and meaning elements of resource and information flows (i.e. metadata) influence processes of task coordination in healthcare teams. The author designed a study that he performed at MD Anderson where healthcare professionals were asked to complete a survey depicting the perceived use and availability of metadata in healthcare operations. In addition to other positive results, an ANOVA test yielded a p-value of less than 0.0001 for metadata's impact on the perceived effectiveness and efficiency of knowledge sharing in healthcare operations. Therefore, hypotheses of the perceived importance of metadata in healthcare team coordination were supported. Providers' tolerance of information flow delay increases when particular types of supplemental information (metadata) are expected and accompany primary information. The contributions from this dissertation represent a novel exploration of three critical factors affecting knowledge sharing in time-critical settings: requirements for coordination and effective knowledge flow with multiple staff expertise bases; a direct focus on time sensitivity for fast-moving healthcare events; and improvements in the design of information support to increase the perceived effectiveness and impact of task coordination processes using HITs. The findings from this research provide an initial development of a tool to be used in assessing the perceptions of knowledge sharing processes in healthcare organizations. In addition, future research could investigate the effects of provider expertise and experience, resource availability, and organizational structure on the availability and use of primary and metadata information to support healthcare task coordination.
Degree
Ph.D.
Advisors
Caldwell, Purdue University.
Subject Area
Industrial engineering|Quantitative psychology|Information science|Health care management
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