Increasing the effectiveness and understanding of health informatics interventions

Groups related to this event

Centre for Health Informatics
Centre for Health Systems and Safety Research

Event date

Wednesday, 11 January 2017

Speaker

Wouter Gude - Department of Medical Informatics, Academic Medical Center, University of Amsterdam

Abstract

Health informatics interventions such as clinical decision support (CDS) and audit and feedback (A&F) have been moderately successful at ensuring patients receive improved care, but their effectiveness is highly variable. CDS provides clinicians with case-specific advice at the point of care (e.g., alerts; reminders), whereas A&F provides population-level performance feedback on quality indicators over a period of time. Reasons for their variable effectiveness are unclear because the mechanisms behind interventions’ success or failure are poorly understood. This limits our ability to design better interventions. The challenge is therefore to speed up the rate with which we increase our understanding of the active ingredients of successful health informatics interventions.

The presentation will argue that we can study the mechanism of digital informatics interventions quantitatively and unobtrusively by harnessing data that are routinely captured as a by-product of using the interventions in real-life. Examples will be provided of an unobtrusive and quantitative process evaluation of an electronic A&F intervention using Coiera’s information value chain framework and Control Theory.

Speaker profile

Wouter Gude is a third year PhD candidate at the Academic Medical Center / University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands. He graduated cum laude from the Master’s programme Medical Informatics at the University of Amsterdam in 2014, and was nominated for the annual best thesis award.

Wouter’s PhD focuses on increasing the understanding and effectiveness of health informatics interventions, audit and feedback interventions in particular. He is particularly interested in performing theory-informed evaluations of digital health informatics interventions, and harnessing electronic data that are a by-product of their use to study their mechanisms of action quantitatively and unobtrusively.

He is involved in the development and/or evaluations of three audit and feedback interventions in different clinical fields and settings: cardiac rehabilitation and intensive care (both in the Netherlands), and primary care (in Greater Manchester, UK).

Seminar details

Date: Wednesday 11th January, 2017

Time: 12pm – 1pm

Location: Seminar room, Level 1, 75 Talavera Road, Macquarie University

Chairperson: Professor Andrew Georgiou, Centre for Health Systems and Safety Research.

Please register for this seminar.