Is 464 lecture 2

IS 464Health Management Applications

General Systems Concepts, Chaos and String Theories, and Social Science Thinking

Introduction

This chapter take a closer look at the gradual breakdown of conventional thinking about organized health care delivery systems.

review general systems concepts and discuss how these concepts relate to the e-health care system and environment.

examine chaos theory and concepts of quantum mechanics

General Systems Concepts

General systems theory (GST) begins with the observation that what we see, hear, and interact with may be rationalized as a hierarchical network of systems and subsystems.

hospital information systems, the e-health care system, and the general health care system.


A system must have a purpose.

set of interrelated parts that function together as a whole toward achieving a common purpose

open or closed.


Open complex systems are characterized by input-process-output triads and feed- back loops.

GST easily describes the flow of appropriate and relevant information about sick patients (input), who are placed into the different subsystems of the acute health care system to be treated and cared for (process) until they are ready, perhaps, to be transferred to another subsystem such as a group home (intermediate output) before being discharged as healthy individuals who can continue to contribute to their work organizational systems (final output).


the principles of GST concerning the behaviors of organizational systems and subsystems were used to think about the design of different classes of clinical and administrative health management information systems.

e-health records (EHRs)


Systems Thinking and Analysis:

Systems thinking means seeing the connections among the processes of change, not just snapshots of changes; in other words, the focus should be on interrelationships rather than linear cause-effect chains.

not only should key factors and variables be tracked carefully, but moderating and intervening variables should also be monitored, to ensure more complete and intelligent management and decisions



Example: in developing an e-public health statistical system to examine and investigate the health of a population, key indicators such as average life expectancy (measured in number of years) and infant mortality (measured in infant deaths per 1,000 live births) must be tracked, and gender, age, race, and other moderating variables such as location and diet should also not be neglected. Ignoring intervening variables could result in an incomplete picture with too many unanswered questions.

The power of e-technologies makes tracking all of these variables a less difficult task than it may seem.



emphasizing the part to emphasizing the whole.

objects as of primary importance to viewing relationships as being of primary importance (network thinking)

paying attention to a single system level to moving between system levels.

……


Metaphors and Mental Models as Systems Analysis Tools:

Final point in the systems thinking and analysis approach to decision making is the development of models

used to obtain valuable insights into thebehavior of a system

Within the context of the e-health care system and its environment, variables often are not easy to quantify; for example, consider the variables involved in ethical, legal, and privacy issues.

intangible factors that affect the behavior of the system are not considered.

Because many of these factors are too difficult or complex to simulate or model



complex information and network needs eye-opening and refreshing approach as neural network.

neural network (NN) may be conceived as a simplified emulation of the connections of the human brain.

Neural networks, with their remarkable ability to derive meaning from complicated or imprecise data, can be used to extract patterns and detect trends that are too complex to be noticed by either humans or simple mathematical and programming techniques.

an e-health organization is capable of adaptive learning, self-organization, and real-time operation.



If system neural networks function in such a way as to pull together all of the necessary information and decision making processes of the organization, then we can argue that not only will these neural networks capture,store,process,and disseminate massive amounts of pre- viously learned information, but they will also be able to coordinate and structure learning of new methods and better approaches among users so as to improve themanagementof the enterprise system



To extend our NN metaphor and its implications for e-health networks and e-communities, evolving organizational knowledge and other enterprise wide networks could have major implications in altering or redirecting the bureaucratic principles of centralized control to a self-learning paradigm. The key here is to create a sharing network of interactions that can self-learn—that is,help generate further learning, shaped or driven by the intelligence of everyone involved in primary decision making through- out the virtual enterprise.



Mental models are also useful in systems thinking because they provide simplifi- cations of complex e-health system structures. Networks can be designed using different mental models, depending on the perspectives of system users.

For B2C models,a service model perspective is most important because the avail- ability of a convenient tool for e-transactions or e-purchases; on-line connection for inquiries to e-stakeholders,includinge-providers,e-vendors,ande-insurers;andreal- time access to relevant information resources are all key to meeting e-consumer needs.



For B2B models,the mental models reflect the views of the participating business entities. For instance, an e-vendor supplying prescription drugs wholesale to one or more retailers on-line will want to know the inventory status of the retailers, their account standing, and average monthly sales volume. An accounting model is there- fore most relevant and appropriate.



Finally, for C2C models, active information exchange and potential for trading transactions lead to a model that balances the perspectives of the consumer-oriented service model and the transactional,accounting-oriented model;inother words,ahy- brid model may be the best framework to pursue.In any case,mental models provide a starting point;system designers and leaders must interpret and determine what consumers and stakeholders expect and want from the system,since those consumers and stakeholders will eventually dictate the success of the new system.





Tutorial

Q: Imagine that you’re living in the age of mobile health where wireless connections prevail. How might you choose among a list of available mobile physicians? What criteria will you use? Cost? Response time? Other measures? How would you go about determining and measuring these criteria?

Tutorial

Search and Download articles

Technology

Is 464 lecture 2