Royal College of Surgeons of EdinburghRoyal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh / University of BathUniversity of Bath

Healthcare Informatics

Evaluation of the use of Web 2.0 technologies in a system for distribution of health and administrative alerts from Health Boards to locum General Practitioners

Ian M. Thompson

GP Partner, East Linton Surgery
Station Road, East Linton, East Lothian, EH40 3DP

Supervisor: Jeremy Wyatt
Professor of eHealth Innovation & Director, Institute for Digital Healthcare
International Digital Laboratory, University of Warwick CV4 7AL

This thesis was submitted in accordance with the requirements for the degree of
Master of Healthcare Informatics
of the
Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh / University of Bath

June 2010

Abstract

Health information alerts come from various sources and are cascaded to General Practitioners (GPs) in Scotland on a regional basis by NHS Health Boards.  Locum GPs work as independent subcontractors contracting with General Practices who then have contracts with NHS Boards, and often miss out on the conventional means of cascading and distributing health information alerts to GPs.

This MSc project presents the development of a Web 2.0 based system to distribute health information alerts to locum GPs. This system is evaluated first in a structural sense comparing the website produced with the specifications and secondly by means of a before and after field-user effect study looking at both access to health alerts via use of the resource and knowledge of the content of health alerts.

It is demonstrated that it is technically possible to build a website that meets all the mandatory criteria and the majority of the optional criteria that are identified as requirements of such a system, by the use of freely available open source website content management (or blogging) software packages with minimal customisation. Results of the field-user effect study are unable to demonstrate improvement in either perceived access to alerts or participants knowledge of the content of alerts.

The difficulties of implementing such a system from a bottom up approach, driven by a locum GP, are highlighted and the issues of completing evaluation a resource limited environment are highlighted. An outline of options for future developments is considered.

Ian Thompson