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Monday, 24 October 2005
37

DECISION MODEL FOR INFORMATION AND COMMUNICATION TECHNOLOGY IMPLICATIONS IN HEALTH SERVICE: USER PERCEPTION

Astrid M. Oddershede, Msc1, Rolando A. Carrasco, PhD2, and Ismael Soto, PhD1. (1) University of Santiago of Chile, Santiago, Chile, (2) University of Newcastle Upon Tyne, Newcastle Upon Tyne, United Kingdom

Purpose: To develop a decision making model based upon users judgments for identifying high-priority dimensions concerning the significance of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) support in quality of health service. Method: Many actions oriented to improve the operation and quality of health service depends on the level of the ICT support. The implementation of new technology competes for funding available to health services and is impossible to introduce them all. A multi-criteria decision model was constructed using the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) to reflect ICT deployment in Chilean hospitals. Empirical data was collected from an expert team comprising diverse representatives' perspective from three categories of hospitals. A comparison process is pursued based on decisive factors and user's preferences to rank the ICT support for health related activities. Results: The AHP application, allows integrating diverse judgements and preferences to achieve an overall result. The prioritisation indicates ICT support has superior impact over supplying clinical care service (54%), a 28% over medical research, and least impact over the patients. Today, the priority utilization is for the support from computer related system (internet, e-mails, web, etc.) (41%) and fix network system (37 %). From the patient perspective the results indicated that patient priority are mainly involved with urgency service requirement (64%). In this concern, the utilisation of fix network system has the highest priority (54,8%). Concerning the gradient sensitivity for patients in urgency requirement wireless technology tends to increment from (20,9%). From administration perspective, the activities such as, delivering test and exams results, within the institution or externally has the highest priority. A strong usage of fix network system (phone, fax, extensions, etc) is detected. From medical research perspective, a strong interaction with database applications implying an increasing demand for computer-assisted support is visualized (55%). Conclusions: The AHP outcomes reveal the main ICT agents/users, the main activities involved in and the critical needs for ICT support in a hospital requirement. This pilot study concludes that combination of fixed and wireless network can give relevant and timely information for better decisions. The most important factors effecting quality in hospital requirement are: availability of services and the need for ubiquitous access to integrated information. The methodology helps decision-makers to elaborate course of action for resource distribution proportional to users requirement.

See more of Poster Session III
See more of The 27th Annual Meeting of the Society for Medical Decision Making (October 21-24, 2005)