Assignment 1: The Approach

Approach Used to Evaluate the Research Project and it's Outcomes.

Goal

The overall goal of my research project is to find why EMR\EHR systems struggle to be used in Southern Africa and are the current systems equipped for issues faced in these countries that are otherwise not found in developed countries. Firstly are Southern African countries using EMR\EHR systems. If so how many Doctors use it as many of these countries do not have a well implemented national healthcare. Why do they not use the systems that are available. Is it because developing countries have issues not found in developed countries and thus current systems are not well equipped. 

Research Method

When looking at research methods it is important to pick methods that are correct for the research you are conducting. Otherwise you could miss something important.

The research methods chosen for this research project will have two key points. 

The first point is literature review of already completed research in the field of EMR\EHR systems in Southern  Africa.  I will hope to use the hermeneutic principle as discussed in Cochrane Collaboration(Katurura and Cilliers, 2018). With this framework which describes the literature review process as fundamentally a process of developing understanding that is iterative in nature (Boell and Cecez-Kecmanovic, 2014). 

The second key point is the use of existing data from EHR\EMR system company\companies. Using this data I wish to create a churn report which will allow me to get quantitative data on customers leaving a company. This will hopefully correlate to issues and found problems form my literature review. 

With this I wish to use mixed research method where I first note and understand the problems occurring in Southern Africa around the use of EMR\EHR systems and then use quantitative data to back my understanding. 

Data 

For my research to succeed I will acquire both quantitative data and qualitive data. 

Quantitative Data

Quantitative data is data that has a realistic it is the facts of a survey or number of attendance. Did you like the new ice-cream flavor? Yes-No. This allows us to acquire stats and gives us the ability to use math to determine whether a group of people enjoyed the ice-cream. 

To complete the goal of my research project I would like create my own research data using a churn model on data which I wish to receive from a current EMR|EHR system company. This data will allow me create a churn model so that I can find out the main reason for people leaving a company that supplies EMR|EHR systems. I hope to then back up the reasons for leaving with the use of other research and find any correlations between my research and that of research already completed.

Qualitive Data 

Qualitive data unlike quantitative data is expressive and descriptive. We cannot use math and cannot be measured. It is used to answer questions like "why?" or "how?". It used to describe a topic rather than measuring it. Think of opinions, impressions and views (Du and Khan, 2020). 

I hope to gather qualitive data to support my findings in my churn model. For instance a comment for a customer leaving "Due to no power I hardly used the system". This will help backup my research findings if I found that lack of electricity is a cause for people leaving or not using EMR|EHR systems.  

Analyze the Data

Once you have your data collected. We need to start analyzing the data. Before any useful information can be extracted the data needs to be observed and cleaned. We do this so we can find missing data and decide what to do with that data. We could wipe the row that data corelates to essentially deleting that row or rows of data from our study or we could perhaps add superficial data like a mean. This process is called data cleaning. It is where we go through the columns of data and ensure the data is uniform by making changes to the dataset. This is all done while keeping the meaning of the data true, we don't want to change what the data means only change it so it can be processed correctly. To create a churn model , which is what I intend to do cleaning the data is an essential step I will need to take in my research. The purpose of data cleaning is to have the data brought up to a level of quality that can be reliably used for the production of machine learning models(van der Loo and de Jonge, 2018)
. 

Once I have created a churn model I will go through existing articles to find if there are any correlations to the results of my churn model and issues found in Southern Africa and the use of EMR\EHR systems. 

Intended Outcomes

The last step of my research project will be to present my finding or lack there of. With my hope of finding correlations between issues faced in Southern Africa and my created churn model. I will determine a course of action for EMR\EHR systems in Southern Africa. 

References

BOELL, S. & CECEZ-KECMANOVIC, D. 2014. A Hermeneutic Approach for Conducting Literature Reviews and Literature Searches. Communications of the Association for Information Systems, 32, 257-286.

DU, Y. & KHAN, H. R. 2020. Data Science for Librarians, ABC-CLIO.

KATURURA, M. C. & CILLIERS, L. 2018. Electronic health record system in the public health care sector of South Africa: A systematic literature review. Afr J Prim Health Care Fam Med, 10, e1-e8.

VAN DER LOO, M. & DE JONGE, E. 2018. Statistical Data Cleaning with Applications in R, Wiley.