Electronic Health Record

Hello everyone,

After consulting Pieter, we decided to shift the focus of my master thesis from the selection process of Hospital Information Systems (HIS) to the selection process of Electronic Health Records (Elektronisch Patiënten Dossier (EPD) in Dutch). We believe that the selection of Electronic Health Records (EHR) is very actual these days and that the field of EHR is more manageable than the field of HIS.

Pieter suggested that I should make more use of my Blog to spread my ideas, even when they are weird, strange or completely wrong. I hope all of you will leave comments on those ideas (in Dutch or English) so I can take those comments into account.

One of those ideas is that we think that the number of required features for an EHR are rather limited, but very powerful. All these basic features are probably present in the current EHR systems so therefore the selection between different EHR systems is not that important. If this is the case we could minimize or even completely eliminate the, often time-consuming and costly, selection process and impose a single EPD system that every hospitals should use in The Netherlands. This would have a huge impact on this market.

Literature review

During the Christmas holiday I really started with the search for relevant literature on my topic. Before that time I already made a start with the literature search but I was very busy with finishing my last master courses. Although those courses are not completed yet, the major part is done so I can start focusing on my literature review.

To be honest it has been proven a bit harder than expected... In the beginning I found that it was difficult to find articles that were both free of charge and relevant to my topic. Lucky enough I realized that the TU/e probably would have an account on the websites so that the articles would be free of charge. Due to making use of keywords I could find relevant articles. On this stage probably I did not find all of them but a good start is made and the Dutch have a nice saying: ‘Al doende, leert men’. ;-)

The main parts on the Hospital Information Systems part that I will try to describe in my literature review are: the history of the HIS, which requirements are contained in HIS, why would hospitals want to invest in HIS, and how are HIS chosen on this moment.

On the selection of HIS part I will try to describe which modeling tools are suitable, (and if for example feature modeling is the appropriate tool) what is feature modeling, which requirements are required for the modeling tool, and which program is the best for the HIS selection.

These are the main parts that I will focus on during my literature review as I believe that they are key issues to address. If other important issues will arise during reading the articles I will takes these into account.


EDIT 12-01-2012:
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Kick-off

My name is Michel Koeken and I am an Operations Management & Logistics (master of Industrial Engineering) student at Eindhoven University of Technology, The Netherlands. I started this blog to give anyone who has an affection with my master thesis the opportunity to provide input and feedback.

The topic of my master thesis: Provide a structural approach in the selection process for Hospital Information Systems (HIS­) using Feature Modeling. My aim is to provide hospitals a structural approach which shows them the HIS that has the best-fit according their needs. I plan to make this structural approach via pure::variants. This is a program which allows the user to generate feature diagrams which in the end can be used to make an explicit choice between several HIS.

On this moment I am busy with my literature study and my final master courses. My last exams will be in week 4 and 5 of 2012. After these exams I will focus all my attention on my master thesis. My literature study and research proposal has to be finished before the start of my master thesis in February to make sure that my master thesis will contribute significantly to the existing literature. A few challenging aspects are to master the program pure::variants, to find the relevant decision criteria used by hospitals for a HIS and to acquire the strengths and weaknesses of the different HIS.

Of course I cannot do this on my own and therefore my mentor dr. P.M.E. (Pieter) van Gorp will help and guide me along the way.

If you have any comments, want to provide feedback, offer your help with my literature study or master thesis and/or are interested in my master thesis please feel free to leave a comment which will be highly appreciated.