e-Health preparedness for a pandemic

Download files
Access & Terms of Use
open access
Copyright: Li, Junhua
Altmetric
Abstract
An influenza pandemic or outbreak of unknown respiratory disease can increase morbidity and mortality levels and, as a result, cause social disruption and economic losses. e-Health, an application of information and communication technologies (ICT) across the whole range of functions which affect health, may mitigate the impact of a pandemic by facilitating pandemic surveillance and control activities, and improving performance of medical practices. The implementation of e-health requires proper planning and management. e- Health preparedness assessment represents an important step in change management, and including this step in its planning process increases the chances of its implementation success. This thesis presents an e-health preparedness assessment model for a pandemic (eHPM4P) which was newly developed and also reports the results of the model s operationalization in healthcare settings. Throughout the project, a three-phase methodology was utilised: 1) a systematic literature review was conducted to identify e-health preparedness components, which led to the conceptual development of an initial e-health preparedness model; 2) the initial model was validated and enhanced using 20 contextual interviews with domain experts. The enhancement involved the quantification of the preparedness constructs by applying the graph theory and Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP); and 3) the enhanced model (eHPM4P) was operationalized by case studies at two hospitals within different cultures. This PhD project contributes to the body of knowledge on change management for clinical ICT innovations. The eHPM4P would be useful for practically assessing an organisation s preparedness status if the organisation plans to implement an e-health system. The assessment results may assist decision makers at the organisation to take action to address deficient areas in their preparedness and thus facilitate the e-health implementation s success. These results may also provide policy makers at national, state and local levels with empirical evidence and insights in order to refine relevant public health policies for the planning and management of pandemics from the ICT perspective. The last chapter of the thesis suggests future studies for further investigation in this research area.
Persistent link to this record
Link to Publisher Version
Link to Open Access Version
Additional Link
Author(s)
Li, Junhua
Supervisor(s)
Ray, Pradeep
MacIntyre, Raina
Seale, Holly
Creator(s)
Editor(s)
Translator(s)
Curator(s)
Designer(s)
Arranger(s)
Composer(s)
Recordist(s)
Conference Proceedings Editor(s)
Other Contributor(s)
Corporate/Industry Contributor(s)
Publication Year
2013
Resource Type
Thesis
Degree Type
PhD Doctorate
UNSW Faculty
Files
download whole.pdf 1.52 MB Adobe Portable Document Format
Related dataset(s)