Designing comprehensible healthcare public reports: An investigation of the use of narratives and tests of quality metrics to support healthcare public report sensemaking.

A key challenge for designers of healthcare public reports is the development of a presentation format that accurately communicates the variability in the quality of care among healthcare systems. This study conducted in the United States explored whether presenting public report information within narratives and with tests of healthcare quality metrics supported the public report sensemaking process. The study involved 200 participants and employed a 2 (public report information presented in the standard format, presented within a narrative) * 2 (no tests of quality metrics added to standard report, metrics tests added) between-subjects experimental design.

Assessing operating room turnover time via the use of mobile application.

Background: Improving operating room (OR) utilization is crucial to hospitals. This study examines the effectiveness of a mobile application co-developed with hospital staff to track OR turnover time (TOT).

Methods: An Android-based app, named ORTimer, was used by staff in two OR units (GI-Lab and D-Core) of Greenville Memorial Hospital (GMH) in South Carolina.

An investigation of the effect of anecdotal information on the choice of a healthcare facility.

This article includes two studies investigating the impact of anecdotal healthcare information from the Internet on healthcare decisions. The availability of anecdotal information on the Internet through social media and peer support groups has increased the risk of the dissemination of misleading information. The first study investigated the effect of demographics, quality of life, health status and public reports usage on the use of anecdotal healthcare information from the Internet.

An investigation of the efficacy of collaborative virtual reality systems for moderated remote usability testing.

Collaborative virtual reality-based systems have integrated high fidelity voice-based communication, immersive audio and screen-sharing tools into virtual environments. Such three-dimensional collaborative virtual environments can mirror the collaboration among usability test participants and facilitators when they are physically collocated, potentially enabling moderated usability tests to be conducted effectively when the facilitator and participant are located in different places. We developed a virtual collaborative three-dimensional remote moderated usability testing laboratory and employed it in a controlled study to evaluate the effectiveness of moderated usability testing in a collaborative virtual reality-based environment with two other moderated usability testing methods: the traditional lab approach and Cisco WebEx, a web-based conferencing and screen sharing approach.

Healthcare information on YouTube: A systematic review.

This article reviews the peer-reviewed literature addressing the healthcare information available on YouTube. Inclusion and exclusion criteria were determined, and the online databases PubMed and Web of Knowledge were searched using the search phrases: (1) YouTube* AND Health* and (2) YouTube* AND Healthcare*. In all, 18 articles were reviewed, with the results suggesting that (1) YouTube is increasingly being used as a platform for disseminating health information; (2) content and frame analysis were the primary techniques employed by researchers to analyze the characteristics of this information; (3) YouTube contains misleading information, primarily anecdotal, that contradicts the reference standards and the probability of a lay user finding such content is relatively high; (4) the retrieval of relevant videos is dependent on the search term used; and (5) videos from government organizations and professional associations contained trustworthy and high-quality information.

An investigation of the efficacy of electronic consenting interfaces of research permissions management system in a hospital setting.

Purpose: Ethical and legal requirements for healthcare providers in the United States, stipulate that patients sign a consent form prior to undergoing medical treatment or participating in a research study. Currently, the majority of the hospitals obtain these consents using paper-based forms, which makes patient preference data cumbersome to store, search and retrieve. To address these issues, Health Sciences of South Carolina (HSSC), a collaborative of academic medical institutions and research universities in South Carolina, is developing an electronic consenting system, the Research Permissions Management System (RPMS).