Renewed scope and selected research method

As stated in my last post I had a meeting with Jo Bollen, a highly experienced consultant in the field of Electronic Health Records, on March 5. After a very informative and lively conversation we came to the conclusion that the best way to conduct a scientific research would be to focus on the eight teaching hospitals (in Dutch: "academische ziekenhuizen") in The Netherlands. These eight teaching hospitals has to select their EHR system through an strict European procurement which consists of huge questionnaires, takes a lot of (costly) time and therefore cost a lot of money. This European procurement can either be a closed or an open procurement, but I will focus on the closed procurement.


In case of the closed European procurement there are only five companies which participate in becoming the supplier of the EHR system for that particular teaching hospital. In random order these companies are: SAP/Siemens, Chipsoft, iSoft, EPIC, and McKesson. Of the eight teaching hospitals already four has completed their closed European procurement in the last five years. Two combined their procurement and two other did it on their own, in total there are three closed European procurement finished. Surprisingly, all three closed European procurement gave different suppliers of the EHR system that is the best to implement in the teaching hospital. This is at least a bit strange. How can it be that the outcome of a procurement by one teaching hospital differs from another procurement, while teaching hospitals doesn't differ that much from each other??


After consulting with my mentor we will focus on the latter question and therefore set the scope to the eight teaching hospitals in The Netherlands for phase 1 of my master thesis. Why only for phase 1 you may ask? Well, this is because of the fact that for a good master thesis you'll have to broaden your scope in the end and see what the results of phase 1, so the results of the teaching hospitals, means for the selection of EHR in general hospitals, which will be phase 2 of my master thesis. The partners with which I will cooperate during phase 1 will be obviously Jo Bollen and hopefully another great partner, but I will wait to mention them until it is certain. Also for the second phase I hopefully have a great partner, but I will not mention them until it is certain.


So that is my plan for my master thesis, but before I can start with the master thesis I will have to finish the literature study. Below you can read my research method if you are interested. 

In the field of Electronic Health Records a lot of literature is available, a simple search for ‘electronic health records’ provides more than 1.8 million articles in Google Scholar. Obviously not all articles can be read for this literature study. Therefore an approach is determined to go through all the available literature in a structured manner.

To make sure that the approach would be thoroughly and properly a small literature study is done by hand searching to determine what would be the best way to conduct the literature study. This hand search led to the following approach where the literature study has been divided into two phases (Holly, Salmond, & Saimbert, 2011):

      -        Phase 1 where the articles would be ranked by the number of citations in Google Scholar;

      -        Phase 2 where a citation chase would be conducted on the top ranked articles to find missing

            articles.

As there is a lot of available literature and the author is relatively new to the subject, phase 1 is a start where the authenticity of the authors is the key factor.  Phase 2 has to follow as there could be a few main articles which most of the top ranked articles cite that is important to this subject. This way the massive amount of articles has been brought back.

To determine how many articles should be included in phase 1: top-3 ranked, top-5 ranked, top-10 ranked, or even higher, there has been made use of the Hirsch contemporary h-index. The original h-index is a way to perform fair ranking of scientists as it accounts for both productivity and impact (Sidiropoulos, Katsaros, & Manolopoulos, 2007). A drawback of the original h-index is its inability to differentiate between active and inactive scientists (Sidiropoulos et al., 2007). (Sidiropoulos et al., 2007) states that their contemporary h-index, which gives more weight to recent articles and thus rewards academics who maintain a steady level of activity, solves this problem.

The program which is used to generate the ranking in number of citations is called Publish or Perish (Harzing, 2007). Het program automatically counts en ranks the number of citations an article has received in Google Scholar. The program generates the contemporary h-index per search query as output and this is used to determine how many articles should be included in the short list. Unfortunately, when a search query provided a contemporary h-index of 10 (e.g. search query = “definition of ehr"), not all of the 10 articles are relevant. To overcome this problem another step is included in phase 1, which is to verify whether all articles that should be included according to the contemporary h-index are relevant.


Please feel free to provide feedback or a comment, it will be highly appreciated. Thanks.