HUMAN PERFORMANCE IMPROVEMENT LITERATURE REVIEW

HUMAN PERFORMANCE IMPROVEMENT LITERATURE REVIEW

Annotation

Organizational communication network interventions should be measured using the data from the different strategies and tactics. Pirnejad H et al. (2008) conducted an observation to evaluate the integration of medical data communication between the secondary caregivers, which are the specialized physicians and the hospital pharmacists and the primary care providers, which include community pharmacists and general practitioners. The study observed how the community and hospital physicians and specialists interacted to share medical information among themselves. There was an IT program identified as TUMA launched in 2004, whose purpose was to exchange the patient medical records between the primary and secondary care providers. One of the TUMA hospital department is to keep the transmission of data to the hospital wards operations from the primary health caregivers. The problem observed was that most medical cases were not shared among the caregivers. Communication networks were mostly seen between physicians with the same level of interactions. Discussions and advice networks are established earlier between the caregivers, but friendships among them come later with the increased interactions (CITED).

The only way that would work to solve the data sharing problems is to establish a human interface where all the care providers could upload and share their work with others. Building an inter-organization communication network would ensure that there is a bridge for linking the information gaps between the primary and secondary health providers. The advantage of using this network intervention is that it would allow the establishment of a program that allowed the specialists and physicians to discuss and receive advice from others both in the community and the hospital. This task required diverse information systems to be combined with various pieces of the patients’ medical records. The barriers that hinder the integration was the problem of forming the technical linkage before the work processes are aligned and integrated. Also, the trust issues between caregivers, which can make some care providers not to provide the necessary details to other caregivers they don’t know.

 

Intervention

About the intervention

Organizations can be described as a set of different interacting groups that are connected or differentiated through demographic, hierarchy, or task characteristics. Relationship mutuality and boundary penetrability affect the accuracy and frequency of these groups within the organizations. Organizational communication is the informal or formal passing of information up and down a hierarchical chain from a sender to a receiver. The official channels of contact include a horizontal and upward flow of information where the interaction follows a rule-based or a prescribed structure.  Informal channels also referred to as grapevine communication, friendly ways of everyday communication, is characterized by a conversation between employee and supervisors where the dialogue does not follow a particular structure.

The organization’s communication network interventions use social networks to generate social influence and improve performance or accelerate the performance behavior so that the desired outcomes can be achieved. According to Thomas W. Valente, network interventions is the process of using the social network data to hasten the change in improving the organization’s performance behavior through implementing an information delivery system for members that should change (Valente,2010 CITED).

Various patterns of communication are established to have a communication channel that allows the smooth flow of the information. Communication patterns can be affected by mutual relationships and physical closeness. These patterns are the Y network, which permits the data to flow upward and downward from employees to a supervisor. The chain network where employees communicate with only the members of the same organization. The wheel network which concedes the information flow between every single person in the group. Here the leader permits the information flow because they act as a central conduit for the whole group. Finally, the communication pattern used by the study is the star network, also known as the all communication network, which allows the information flow between all members of the group. Here information sharing is through conversations and discussions in the groups. The human interface program is used to link the members through computer software where dialogues and debates are established to share information. This discussion network is more appropriate for the intervention because it allows a piece of information to be in written format, which is suitable for the relying of data that need explanations of the necessary information.

Types of performance problems the intervention addressed

In the 1950s, the organizational communication focused largely on the role in which the organization benefited both from the input and the output. In the 1990s, the critical theory of influence became more concerned with the role of communication in an organization. Intervening the community and the hospital physicians and specialists would ensure that the knowledge of different caregivers is shared among them, which would eventually boost the medical caregiving tactics. This communication network intervention would improve the quality of health care and the medication procedure from healthcare providers. For organizations to improve performance, organizational communication systems are necessary and essential to the organization (CITE, HERBERT).

To address the problem choosing the right network intervention is very important. The response depended on the goals and objectives to be achieved by establishing the initiation base. Next, the right types of network intervention were developed, for example, training the group members and the correct media type to be used for data coding. The intervention used the network as the delivery system to learn from for the information shared by the change agents.

patterns and trends of intervention application

The network intervention expends the persistent efforts in social networks to produce a social influence that improve the performance and accelerate behavioral change in performance, which allows achievement of the desired outcomes among the organizations. In the Netherlands, an inter-organizational communication project was used in which the secondary caregivers shared data with the primary caregivers to evaluate the attending service challenges from data integrity and integration through the communication network. This project was to answer the question of how data sharing was attained in the communication network.

The diffusion of the innovative theory is the basis of network interventions, and it explains how new ideas and practices disperse between and within the communities (CITED VALENTE). An increased number of publications have been established to describe projects that integrated medical data from several information systems. An argument by Cruz Correia et al. (2007) stated that these publications omitted to mention any type of error that the interventions underwent.

 

Successful or shortcoming of the intervention

The intervention was successful, but before it achieved its goal, it experienced several problems. These problems include the omission of some of the medical items like the administration data, the currently used medication, potential medications, temporary medication, and medication appearance messages. Also, some medical patient data appeared in the wrong document; for example, the history of one patient appeared with the diagnosis from another patient’s records. The intervention best worked when the health care providers communicated through the software, which provided a summary of the patients’ records. Patients also played an essential role in the succession of the intervention by transferring their medical information from one level of health care to another.

The problem due to the coding system consists of items that are data mismatches which are caused by the various levels of the code in different information systems. Faultiness also occurred when there was a wrong application of code or failing in coding when entering the patients’ records or while updating the programming systems. Some of the problems continued even after the vast technical intervention. The unexpected conflicts and issues related to the joining of responsibilities and work were distributed to different parties and presented concentrating on their impact on TUMA.

 

 

Description of the effectiveness of the intervention

The intervention was successful with the implementation of the technical human interference linkage. To be entirely successful with the aligning and application of a proper working process. The working routines should also be regularly updated to provide information aligned to the health care provider. Patients are also considered as the link since they build the basis of the for health care provision from each health care provider. The software problems can also be solved by updating them to the current software’s which would solve problems like data traffic in the system, which would allow the proper successfulness of the intervention.

 

 

 

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