Journal of Health Information Management
Year:2017 | Volume:13 | Issue:5 (51) |Papers Count:13

Introduction: Websites of university research institutes play an important role in communicating and providing services to their users. The aim of this study was to determine the quality of websites of research institutes affiliated to Iranian universities of medical sciences.Methods: This applied study was carried out using cross-sectional method in winter 2014. The dedicated websites of research institutes were evaluated using a pre-validated checklist. This checklist addressed four dimensions of websites quality: content, design, organization and user-friendliness. For sorting the quality of websites, a score of 1 to 5 was given to each criterion of these dimensions by experts. Excel software was used to analyze the data.Results: The studied websites conformed to standard quality criteria by means of 81% for content, 85% for design, 89% for organizing and 77% for user-friendliness. Overall, the obtained scores in four dimensions of websites quality ranged from 74% to 90% of the maximum score for each item.Conclusion: In general, the websites of the research institutes affiliated to Iranian universities of medical sciences were in desirable conditions in terms of conforming to four dimensions of website quality. However, to increase the efficiency and productivity of these websites, research institutes should consider other neglected quality criteria in the design of their websites.

Introduction: Women experience many challenges post mastectomy. Information seeking plays a key role in empowering them to do self-care, improving their quality of life and improving their health. However, individual and contextual barriers hinder their access to needed information. This research aimed to identify those barriers.Methods: This was a qualitative research using conventional content analysis.17 women were recruited through purposive sampling in Bandar Abbas, Hormozgan Province, Iran, and semi-structured interviews were conducted among them.Results: Seven central themes were emerged to explain women's experiences of barriers in information seeking post mastectomy among which fear, shame, and inadequate literacy were individual; and economic status, physicians and healthcare personnel, lack of access to information resources and others’ behavior were contextual barriers.Conclusion: Despite the necessity of access to health information for women post mastectomy, results showed individual and contextual information seeking barriers. Hence, necessary actions should be taken by health authorities especially institutions for women health to reform and revise heath system in order to tackle information seeking barriers for women post mastectomy.

Introduction: This article aimed to study the main constituents of professional information seeking in organizational context of Emergency Medical Management (EMS) and Disaster Management Center in Bushehr City, Iran. In this study, we tried to investigate the relationship between job duties, professionalism, and information sources in organizational context.Methods: This study was done on the basis of a qualitative method called "interpretive field study". The method of data gathering was interview, observation, and the investigation of Emergency Medical Management documents. For data analysis, at first the concepts was extracted from the interviews and then, they were clustered. Finally, describing the relationship among the set of concepts, a model was presented for information Seeking of Bushehr emergency medical management technicians.Results: In this model, it became clear that the nature of job of emergency medical management technicians had divided their information seeking to two part: during the processes and after the processes. During the implementation of processes, information seeking was done in the decision-making time which was based on experience and collective consultation. After the implementation of the processes, to answer the information needs, the search for sources began. Method of discerning the information needs, searching for sources (experience, group consultation, official sources, …) during the implementation of process and after that, depended on job training, personal behaviors, and organizational norms which were present in study context.Conclusion: The emergency medical management authorities should consider the nature of profession and organizational context in information seeking behavior and should utilize from various information seeking pattern to meet the information requirements of emergency medical management technicians.

Introduction: Research Gate is one of the first social networks aims to foster collaboration and communication between researchers and their readers. The goal of the present research was to study the degree of presence of Isfahan University of Medical Sciences researchers in Research Gate.Methods: The current study was a survey research using altmetrics data. The data of Isfahan University of Medical Sciences and its researchers were loaded through Research Gate social network in February 2015. Then, the data were analyzed based on indicators Research Gate score, total publications, total impact, loads, and views and descriptive statistics.Results: 947 of the researchers in Isfahan University of Medical Sciences had joined and loaded 2984 scientific works in Research Gate. In addition, School of Medicine was the most active school with 659 active researchers and 200 scientific works. Moreover, in terms of the number of researchers, Department of Pediatrics was known as the most active department with 237 researchers.Conclusion: Despite the great number of university researchers in Isfahan University of Medical Sciences which is one of the great universities of Iran, the results showed that the amount of researchers’ presence in Research Gate is relatively low. This may indicate the researchers’ limited use of Research Gate network facilities.

Introduction: Due to the high prevalence of depression and the considerable pressure it puts on individuals, society and healthcare system, it is essential to conduct sufficient research to help with decision making in prevention, treatment and control of this condition. To assist with research planning and setting priorities, this paper aimed to identify the thematic structure of papers related to depression treatment.Methods: This was an applied research study which used Scientometrics approach. To obtain data, the keyword “Depression” was searched as a mesh descriptor with the subdivision “Therapy” in PubMed database for the period of 2005 to 2014. The data were analyzed using co-word and clustering methods with the help of Excel and SPSS software packages.Results: The growth of scientific production in this field appeared to have been balanced throughout the ten-year period examined in the study. The most active research areas for the two five year periods (2005-2009 and 2010-2014) were drug therapy, psychology, and medication adherence. Two hierarchical graphs of descriptors for each five-year period were prepared both of which were composed of 12 clusters with 34 common descriptors.Conclusion: The findings based on the inclusion index showed that only 20 percent of topics in the second five-year period of the study were novel. Therefore, it could be concluded that research areas that were related with each other in previous years will probably co-occur with other topics in the future might disappear. In every discipline, some topics are considered to be fundamental and research works are being carried out on them almost every year.

Introduction: Prediction of future subjects is a necessity for policy making in science field, which is done by different variables. Accordingly, present research was conducted to predict basic concepts in the field of colon cancer based on the factor of oldness and frequency use of subject terms.Methods: The present study was a descriptive-applied research. PubMed database was used to extract the data. Two separate searches were done on two 25-year-period studies, one from 1965 to 1989, and one from 1990 to 2015. In order to determine and predict important subjects of colon cancer domain (Colonic Neoplasms), two factors of oldness and annual frequency use of the terms were used. To do this, frequency and duration of the use of each of these terms were noticed in a period of 25 years. Then, climax or deterioration of the subject terms in future documents was predicted based on their reducing and increasing frequency in use during a special period.Results: Studying the degree of conformity between predicted subjects and newly found basic subjects in colon cancer etiology during 1990 to 2015, 128 subjects were predicted as the key subjects for future out of which, 73 cases (58%) occurred in the second period. In addition, studying the degree of conformity between the mentioned 73 cases and the second period basic subjects indicated that predicted subject issues constitute 22% of the key subjects of the second period.Conclusion: The results of the present research and the studies on predicting future trends showed that there was no method to predict the future subject issues with certainty and high accuracy. It seems that various methods of scientometrics and experts’ views should be considered together in order to have a precise prediction.

Introduction: Considering the importance of using indexing tools such as thesauri and Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) in storage and retrieval of medical information, this study was performed with the aim to determine the compliance rate of keywords of articles published in an English-language journal Shahid Beheshti University of Medical Sciences, Journal of Paramedical Sciences, with the MeSH.Methods: This was a cross-sectional and descriptive study using applied method. The data gathering tool was a researcher-made checklist. In total, 1143 keywords extracted from 269 articles published in 24 issues of the journal; those keywords were compared with MeSH, and were classified in three groups: exact match, partial match and no match.Results: During the investigated years, on average, 277 keywords (24.2%) were exact matches, 409 keywords (35.8%) were partial matches, and the 457 keywords (40.0%) were not match with the terms contained in the MeSH. keywords in match or match with the entry term categories formed the largest portion of partial match keywords.Conclusion: The results show that the authors of this journal do not have sufficient knowledge on correct keyword selection with use of the MeSH, and it is necessary for them to be trained in the correct way. In addition, the editorial board of this English-language Iranian journal in the paramedical field should request authors to adjust their keywords based on the MeSH during article selection.

Introduction: Altmetrics is a new concept retrieved from citation indicators based on Web 2.0 that can evaluate all academic outputs. This descriptive survey aimed to compare the citation rate of academic articles affiliated by Guilan University of Medical Sciences, Iran, in two social scientific networks.Methods: The recent study was descriptive applied research carried based on scietometric approach. All of the academic articles with affiliation of Guilan University of Medical Sciences indexed in Scopus from 1997 to 2015 (845 articles) were chosen. Then, the citation rates of articles with details of indicators in two scientific social networks, Research Gate and Mendeley were followed. The collected data were analyzed using SPSS software, through analytical statistic tests such as Student-t and Pearson Correlation Coefficient testss. The significant level was less than 0.05 in this study (P<0.05).Results: All of 845 academic papers were cited 3199 times in Scopus database until 2015. The citation rate in Research Gate (87%) was more than the citation rate in Mendeley (52%). There was a positive significant correlation between citation rate of articles, observation rate and download rate of articles in Resaerch Gate. In addition, there was a positive significant correlation between citation rates with reading frequency of articles in Mendeley (P<0.05).Conclusion: According to the results, the Research Gate and Mendeley scientific networks have more impact on increasing the amount of download and as a result, the citation rate of articles. Therefore, researchers in medical sciences can use these networks as a "search for information" and "self-archive" for the purpose of greater use and citation of their scientific activities.

Introduction: Medical tourism is travelling overseas to obtain medical care. Obtaining competitive advantage in this industry is crucial in many destinations particularly Asian countries. This study investigated the factors contributing to the competitive advantage of Iranian medical tourism marketing.Methods: This was a descriptive case study research. To gather the data, a questionnaire consisted of 15 Likert-scaled questions with an 70 percent reliability on Cronbach's alpha test was randomly distributed among 67 Iranian heart surgeons, ophthalmologists and medical tourists using screening sampling. The collected data was analyzed using t and chi-square tests utilized with SPSS software.Results: There was a statistically significant dependency between competitive advantage and factors like physician’s skills, treatment and travel costs, waiting list and hospital technology and services. Physician’s skills included success in surgery, right and timely diagnostics and prescription. Cost included items such as doctor’s visit cost, medicine, visa, accommodation, hospital and surgery. Waiting list consisted of required time for doctor’s visit and visa processing. Regarding hospital technology and services, items such as operating room equipment, service quality and accommodation facilities were considered.Conclusion: The results show that Iran has a strong competitive advantage in physician’s skills, low costs of treatment, travel and short waiting lists, respectively. Nevertheless, Iran is not highly advantageous in utilizing latest hospital technology and providing high-quality services to medical tourists.

Introduction: The alignment of information systems with organizational objectives is a key challenge for health care organizations and the key to the success of the organization. The aim of this study was to review the literature on aligning health information systems with organizational objectives by organizations’ chief information officers (CIOs).Methods: A literature review was carried out using Google search engine, PubMed and Science Direct databases. The search strategy included using keywords such as “aligning”, “health information system”, “organizational objective”, “health care organization” and “CIO” to search in journals (full text and abstracts), books, proceeding of conference articles, and scientific documents from 1998 to 2014. An estimated total of 89 articles, books, theses, and proceedings were retrieved of which 35 cases were selected based on their relevance to this issue.Results: Despite introduction of various methods and mechanisms in the literature, all studies agreed on several steps for alignment of information system with organizational objectives. These objectives included understanding the organization, understanding the information technology domain and its capabilities, creating multiple information technology strategies and implementation of strategies by the chief information officers. It was possible to receive feedback and change the strategy of choice at every step.Conclusion: Aligning information systems with organizational objectives is a dynamic process. Achieving this alignment requires a structured process. The most important mechanisms for this alignment include content, timing and personnel linkage in the process by chief information officers.