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A L Valenta

Publications and source records attributed to A L Valenta.

6 recordsLinked to original sources
PubMed1999

Preparing chief information officers for the clinical information systems environment.

Over the past decade, the chief information officer (CIO) in the health care enterprise has gained recognition as a member of the senior management team based on an understanding of business processes and business language. The clinical information system (CIS) in the health care environment poses a new frontier for CIOs, who are generally unfamiliar with both clinical languages and clinical processes. The authors discuss the role formal informatics training can have in preparing learners for future careers as CIOs in CIS environments. The health information management (HIM) specialization within the MBA program at the University of Illinois at Chicago is one example of an educational program designed to train future CIOs who can manage the business, technical, and clinical aspects of the health care environment.

Humans↗
PubMed1996

Early results of user profiles: physicians' opinions on the use of information technology.

The role of physicians in today's managed care context is viewed as that of economic partner and clinical decision-maker, operating under the rules of professional autonomy and independence. To a considerable degree, physicians need to feel intrinsically motivated in order to change and adapt to new forms of health care delivery and information management. Today, health information managers use the rapid advances in telecommunications and computing technologies to plan and build vast health information networks, while at the same time receiving little support from systematic research to help understand, segment, and address the range of physicians' concerns and perceptions regarding these systems. This study's design employs a novel combination of qualitative and quantitative methods: first, to identify individual physician opinion profiles, and second, to group these profiles into clusters of similar perceptions. Opinions were obtained from primary care physicians in the Chicago area and resulted in four distinctly different profiles: Early Adopter, Traditional Family Doctor, Hesitant-Defensive Acceptor, and Unwilling-Uneasy Participant.

Adult↗
PubMedDate not supplied

Q-methodology: definition and application in health care informatics.

OBJECTIVE: To introduce the Q-methodology research technique to the field of health informatics. Q-methodology--the systematic study of subjectivity--was used to identify and categorize the opinions of primary care physicians and medical students that contributed to our understanding of their reasons for acceptance of and/or resistance to adapting information technologies in the health care workplace. DESIGN: Thirty-four physicians and 25 medical students from the Chicago area were surveyed and asked to rank-order 30 opinion statements about information technologies within the health care workplace. The Q-methodology research technique was employed to structure an opinion typology from their rank-ordered statements. (The rank-ordered sorts were subjected to correlation and by-person factor analysis to obtain groupings of participants who sorted the opinion statements into similar arrangements.) RESULTS: The typology for this study revealed groupings of similar opinion-types associated with the likelihood of physicians and medical students to adapt information technology into their health care workplace. A typology of six opinions was identified in the following groups: (1) Full-Range Adopters; (2) Skills-Concerned Adopters; (3) Technology-Critical Adopters; (4) Independently-Minded and Concerned; (5) Inexperienced and Worried; and (6) Business-Minded and Adaptive. It is imperative to understand that in the application of Q-methodology, the domain is subjectivity and research is performed on small samples. The methodology is a combination of qualitative and quantitative research techniques that reveals dimensions of subjective phenomena from a perspective intrinsic to the individual to determine what is statistically different about the dimensions and to identify characteristics of individuals who share common viewpoints. Low response rates do not bias Q-methodology because the primary purpose is to identify a typology, not to test the typology's proportional distribution within the larger population. CONCLUSION: Q-methodology can allow for the simultaneous study of objective and subjective issues to determine an individual's opinion and forecast their likeliness to adapt information technologies in the health care workplace. This study suggests that an organization's system implementers could employ Q-methodology to individualize and customize their approach to understanding the personality complexities of physicians in their organization and their willingness to adapt and utilize information technologies within the workplace.

Attitude of Health Personnel↗