Abstract
Health information technology has contributed to improvements in quality and safety
in clinical settings. However, the implementation of new technologies in health care
has also been associated with the introduction of new sociotechnical hazards, produced
through a range of complex interactions that vary with social, physical, temporal,
and technological context. Other industries have been confronted with this problem
and have developed advanced analytics to examine context-specific activities of workers
and related outcomes. The skills and data exist in health care to develop similar
insights through situational analytics, defined as the application of analytic methods
to characterize human activity in situations and identify patterns in activity and
outcomes that are influenced by contextual factors. This article describes the approach
of situational analytics and potentially useful data sources, including trace data
from electronic health record activity, reports from users, qualitative field data,
and locational data. Key implementation requirements are discussed, including the
need for collaboration among qualitative researchers and data scientists, organizational
and federal level infrastructure requirements, and the need to implement a parallel
research program in ethics to understand how the data are being used by organizations
and policy makers.
Keywords
qualitative - methodologies - evaluation - system improvement - analytics - data access
- integration - analysis
