This page holds work for the Fall 2008 IS 366a course. You can view other people's portfolios by clicking on the IS366a tag on the bottom of this page, or by editing this page and looking in the sidebar.
IS 366a Reflection Narrative
The most important take away from this course is the practical knowledge and experience from actually conducting qualitative research that I could not get from the text book our lectures.
The course highlights the actual conceptualization of a qualitative research problem, conducting literature search, coming up with a preliminary research question, negotiating access to the research site, conducting observations and refining the research question.
An important part of the process was being a part of, and witnessing the actual negotiating process using gentle persuasion with stakeholders to gain access to the research site.
An interesting aspect also is the inherent dynamic nature of the qualitative research question. In particular how the research question adapts to the object of the study, the research question changes as new observations are made and qualitative data collected.
We started out with an objective of looking at, the impact of access to information at the point of care in the emergency department. We then refine this question to focus on electronic medical records in the emergency department, which is not much deviation from the original objective because of the emergency medical record present information at the point-of-care quite effectively.
For further exploration warrants further investigation:
- Qualitative Clinical Investigation:
– Introduction of an EMR system reduces emergency department length of stay
- Qualitative study of the impact of ED EMR system on:
– Overcrowding and waiting time
– Renege rate
– Error reduction, safety and patient satisfaction
- Qualitative study of the impact of EMR system on nurses and physicians workload and job satisfaction
- Qualitative study of the ability of EMR system:
– To monitor current and near future ED crowding
– To enable efficient communication