Update literature review

After my last post on January 30^th I had one exam of a master course left on February 2^nd. The good news is that I passed all my master courses in the last semester, but unfortunately these master courses took all my time so I couldn’t work on my literature review. Monday February 6^th was the first official day that I could start working fulltime on my literature review. The first week was a bit messy, which way I want to go, how I can get there, which literature is applicable and (maybe more important) which don’t!

This week is more productive as I made use of the protocol by Vanwersch. It is a protocol which provides more structure to a literature review and I could definitely use that.

The protocol consists of different steps and through these steps I hope to deliver a structured literature study:

1)      Search for an initial set of studies by making use of search keys.

2)      Through relevance screening and quality screening the initial set of studies is brought back to those studies which are relevant and of good quality. The screening procedure is done by implementing inclusion and exclusion criteria.

3)      Extract useful data from each included study.

4)      Summarize and compare the extracted data critically.

These search keys are ideally derived from the research question(s). My research question(s) are not final yet, but my broad subject is: ‘Provide a structural approach in the selection process for Electronic Health Records using Feature Modeling’.

In this broad subject are a few important factors like ‘Electronic Health Records’, ´Feature Modeling’, and ‘selection process’. I’m not sure if I will keep these factors, but for now I think they are sufficient. I have a meeting with Pieter Van Gorp later today in which these factors will be discussed.

I think the best way to tackle the literature review is to go through all four steps by Vanwersch for one search key before I start with the next search key. 

The factors listed above are not suitable as search key (e.g. the search term ‘Electronic Health Records’ provides 26,700 studies!!). I decided to start with the factor ‘Electronic Health Records’ as this is a correct factor for sure. But how could I bring that enormous number of studies back to a manageable number? First of all I decided to do a little brainstorm session (see attached picture). What do I want to know from this factor and which sub factors come into play?

The first search keys I used are:

·         “definition of electronic health records” (18 studies found, 13 useful)

·         “definition of EHR" (58 studies found, 22 useful)

For step one, the initial set of studies, I entered the search key into Google Scholar and found, for example, 58 studies with the search term “definition of EHR". Five studies were not available to me and by a quick scan 31 studies were invalid or unusable due to the fact that they only stated the search term and not really provided a definition of an EHR. Therefore 22 studies are in my initial set of studies.

Things to do:

·         Step two until four of the used search key

·         Determine other search keys

On March 5^th I have an appointment with Jo Bollen which is a senior general manager working on executive level with more than 25 years of experience in healthcare. Hopefully he can help me further with my master thesis.