Clinical Information Systems: Clinical Decision Support in Surgical for Infection Control: a Design Science Research

Abstract

Theoretical contributions on the progress in measuring and monitoring ‘patient safety’ state that relatively few healthcare institutions have fully implemented information systems with decision support capabilities. There is an evident absence of systematic measurement of patients’ compliance in virtually every healthcare system. Patient compliance, such as compliance to treatments or adherence to medication is all but unmeasured today. The inability to measure progress makes it exceptionally difficult to sustain efforts toward supporting improvement initiatives. Presently, little research is performed on the intersection of health care and clinical information systems with a focus on measurement systems and decision support systems. Instead, the emphasis is heavily on implementing electronic patient record (EPR) systems. This study focuses on the design and development of a decision support prototype in surgical care for measuring process compliance pertaining to infection control. The authors introduce a reference surgical information model and a design prototype. First, a literature study is performed in two areas which are related to infection control and national patient safety programmes. Secondly, the prototype is instantiated and tested by performing a basic quantitative analysis amongst a sample of 7000 paediatric patients in order to determine the usability and applicability of the prototype design on data quality aspects and compliance measurement.