Stephen Lean

Citation

Thesis Title
A Computational Approach to Health Information Quality Indicators

Read article at Massey Research Online:

General Practitioners (GPs) must be able to justify their reliance on, or rejection of, health information they are presented with. Mr Lean investigated practicing GPs to determine how health information is evaluated. He found that the GPs used criteria based on tacit knowledge, past experience, and community knowledge in the evaluation process. This process can be time consuming, with desired information not being readily available. A formal model capable of capturing semantics for the quality criteria was developed. A prototype system that showed the identified quality criteria could be detected within health information and captured using the developed model was implemented. The implementation used an international standard for electronic health record communication that required no adaption or extension. Overall, results show that if the full benefits of electronic health information use are to be realised, criteria deemed important to know in the evaluation process should be explicitly highlighted to the GPs.

Supervisors
Professor Hans Guesgen
Associate Professor Inga Hunter
Dr Kuda Dube