Electronic Health Record in Small Physician Practices
Rao and his colleagues intend to investigate the variation that occurs in the adoption of Electronic health records as regards their functionalities, use patterns, challenges to adoption, apparent benefits, and how they relate to the size of the physician practice.
The research design comprised of a mailed survey. This survey was mailed to a representative sample, on a national scale of physicians that are currently practicing as listed in the Physician Master File of the American Medical Association. The methodology applied involved a mail survey to a random sample of 5000 physicians. For the analysis, they were grouped according to their practice size and the total number of categories was four. Analyses were weighted to adjust for sample design and non-response and standard errors were obtained from multivariable regression models. The study concluded that HER adoption was considerably lower in small practices.
Barriers and Facilitators to Knowledge Management in University Research Centres
The study highlights the perceptions of 152 researchers from a variety of Portuguese research centres regarding the facilitators and barriers to knowledge management. They considered three main domains, knowledge gathering, creation and diffusion. This was considered less than three dimensions of barriers and/or facilitators, which are individual, socio-organizational processes and technology. The methodology applied was the selection of a convenience sample of 152 researchers working in 17 research centres in the University of Arvein in Portugal. The research centres are concerned with a wide range of research fields such as sciences and humanities. The study was carried out by presenting lists of facilitators and barriers and the participants were expected to add or remove items they felt to belong to the respective lists or had been left out. The outcome of the study indicated that the majority of the participants agreed with the stipulated lists of facilitators and barriers. Those that did not, added a long list of features onto the existing lists of barriers and facilitators. The conclusion was hereby drawn that the university was facing universal challenges.
An Empirical Examination of a Process-Oriented IT Business Success Model
The study aims at identifying the value of IT to modern organizations. The study employs a multivariate approach summarized into two major proponents which are examining how It and no-IT variables affect the so named IT success variables and the second is the so-called IT business value. IT business value can be defined as the contribution of IT to firm performance. The theoretical considerations of the study are grouped into two major facets: IT success literature and IT business value literature. The research methodology involved the development of a pool of items from the research literature. This information was used to refine the instrument whist data from a survey sample were used to assess the validity of the said instrument as well as its reliability to test the hypothesized relationships of the research model. Some explicit conclusions were drawn from the study and they can be summarily stated as the relationship between IT success and firm performance appears to be strong if the “causal distance” between the factors measuring the two is short.
IT VALUE: The Great Divide between Qualitative and Quantitative, and Individual and Organizational Measures
The study aims at establishing the value of IT systems within an organization, with particular emphasis on productivity. Productivity is the fundamental economic measure of a technology’s contribution. The research design involved the selection of four top MIS journals published between 1993 and 1998. These journals were further scrutinized for key words such as computers, systems, technology and also others such as evaluation efficiency, investment payoffs and such. The data analysis relied primarily on organizational level analyses. The sample selection simply consisted of all articles published in those journals and their consequent classification as IT value articles and related articles. The implications of the study were that researchers in the future would be better served by emphasizing theory generation, explicitly recognizing the limitations of current methods and measures in IT and becoming more aware as researchers of one’s own assumptions as well as biases. The study revealed that the journals addressed the question “what value do IT investments provide?” the study also revealed that there was a shortfall in all the journals as regard to addressing “why, where, when, and to whom these investments produce value?”