Health information technology (health IT) is an emerging interdisciplinary research field that brings innovative and unique opportunities as well as challenges for information systems (IS) researchers. Public Health Informatics (PHI) is an important subdomain of health IT but yet extensively studied by IS researchers. The limited IS literature on PHI surveillance, especially on regulatory science opens new gates for IS researchers to test existing and develop new theories, to design and configure innovative methods and models, and to provide practical health managerial insights. The emerging information technology innovations provide novel insights and opportunities to improve public health surveillance. Specifically, social media analytics and intelligence, broadly accepted and applied in the current IS domains, has motivated a new branch of research in regulatory science that may bear prolific fruits both in theoretical and pragmatic perspectives. This dissertation seeks to address the problem and fills the research gaps by proposing a systematic research framework for regulatory science surveillance using social media-driven approaches. Five essays in the design science paradigm are developed. Essay I aims to provide a basic understanding of social media user-generated content on regulated products by text mining and social network analysis techniques. User-generated content can further motivate research on the user level. Essay II takes this perspective and models user features based on text.Healthcare Informatics Research And Innovation Essay Essay III focuses on another important feature of social media – network structures, and develops a computational algorithm for large-scale social network analysis on modeling social influence. After proposing innovative IS solutions to real regulatory public health problems, essay IV endeavors to validate the use of social media datasets by combining survey and social media data for data triangulation. Finally, essay V, motivated by the keyword-based social media data collection processes, strives to automatically and accurately detect sensitive regulated product street names, utilizing rich text information in the ever-changing linguistic environment on social media. Beyond the practical insights of health decision support and solutions provided in each essay, this dissertation offers a systematic social media-driven regulatory science informatics research paradigm to guide future PHI and other analytical IS research.Healthcare Informatics Research And Innovation Essay
Introduction Health informatics is the bridging of computer science, information and the health care field. This interdisciplinary field can be applied to a range of medical fields such as nursing, biomedicine, medicine and subspecialties such as immunology (immunoinformatics). Informatics not only has roles to play in day-to-day areas of immunology such as data storage/retrieval, decision support, standards and electronic health care records but also in research and education such as data mining and simulation systems (Coiera, 2002). Informatics and more specifically, health informatics first started being used in in the late 1950s with the rise of computers (Ho, 2010). Technologies such as computers allowed practitioners and researches
Decision support systems are ideally interactive systems that allow the decision making physician to come to the conclusion based on a host of information pulled from data bases, personal knowledge, predesigned modals etc. Decision support systems have many benefits such as; patient-time efficiency, speed up process of decision making, promotes learning and training, reveals new approaches in thought process, generates new evidence in support of a decision and encourages exploration and discovery of the decision maker (Bosworth, York, Kotansky, & Berman, 2011). Although these systems require end user expertise, correct inputs and appropriate modals, they also require vast and exstenive information. Immunoinformatics are used to compile vast amounts of data for the immunology field (De Groot A. , Immunomics: discovering new targets for vaccines and therapeutics , 2006). This data includes genetic mapping, protein structures, cytometry data and many other data pools needed by immunologists to make correct decisions.Healthcare Informatics Research And Innovation Essay
Understanding the intellectual structure of health informatics is crucial to the whole
health informatics community. In general, the intellectual structure of a discipline bespeaks the
topics and paradigms selected by a field, the research themes that emerge over time, the thought
leaders who direct the efforts of its various research programs, and the relationships between
various structural components. Gaining deep insights into the intellectual structure of a
discipline can lead to defining moments for a community of scholars