Improving quality of service of home healthcare units with health information technologies.

Deployment of health information technologies (HITs) provides home care units with the means to generate improvements in accuracy and timeliness of information required to meet dynamic patient demands and provide high quality patient care. Increasing availability of information can also facilitate organisational learning, which leads to the invocation of processes that result in improved responses and decisions. This study examined crucial links between HITs and quality of service provided through an empirical investigation of 252 patients in a hospital-in-the-home unit (HHU) in a Spanish regional hospital.

An application of the Hospital-in-the-Home unlearning context.

Many researchers who have investigated health care organizations have indicated that health care professionals are replete with outdated knowledge, and some researchers go even further to argue that without the presence of a context that facilitates unlearning (forgetting) practitioners may lose the ability to recognize relevant changes with respect to knowledge pertaining to all aspects of the health care sector and they may decide to rely on potentially out-of-date knowledge and inappropriate ways of interpreting data with attendant loss of decision quality and attendant risks. This article presents an analysis and develops a model of the factors that influence unlearning which is focused on the health care industry and is comprised of three constituent components: (1) a framework characterizing the lens through which individuals view situations; (2) a framework for characterizing how individual habits change; and (3) a framework for characterizing the manner in which emergent understandings are consolidated into existing knowledge and knowledge structures. The model was developed and analyzed using qualitative data from the Hospital-in-the-Home Unit of a Spanish Regional Hospital.