1,720,961 research outputs found
A Systems Thinking Approach To Apply Water Sustainability In Hospitals
No full textOne of the most critical challenges the world is facing is to ensure everyone has access to an adequate and quality supply of water. As the population increases, the demand for water rises. Water needs to be sustained for current and future generations. Sustainability acts to balance the resource supply and demand. Hospitals are a major consumer of water. Unfortunately water is facing the challenges of diminishing resources and increasing demands. Therefore, considering water sustainability in hospitals is of significant importance. Water sustainability in hospitals is also important since hospitals offer services to help people improve the quality and health of their daily lives. Hospitals are large complex systems that consist of various elements and relationships. Systems engineering guides the engineering of complex systems and can be used to help address the multi-faceted and complex sustainability challenges. A systems thinking approach is applied to comprehend how various factors related to hospitals and water sustainability interact.System dynamics is a systems thinking approach in systems engineering. This approach provides a better understanding of water sustainability considerations in hospitals and visualizes and explores the structure and behavior of factors and factor relationships related to water sustainability in hospitals. Healthcare sustainability causal models are developed and represent the factors and relationships that contribute to sustainability in healthcare. A causal model related to water sustainability in hospitals is also developed that represents key factors and factor relationships related to water sustainability in hospitals. A simulator is developed that models the behavior of different factors related to hospitals and water sustainability and helps decision makers with their decision making process and understand the impacts of their decisions
A Review of Systems Science in the Information Systems Discipline
Get PDFThis research project examines modern applications of von Bertalanffy’s (1950, 1968) general systems theory (GST) as well the related theoretical lenses of systems thinking and systems engineering (e.g., Checkland, 1999) within the information systems (IS) domain. While there have been calls to more deeply incorporate contemporary systems science into the IS discipline (e.g., Lee, 2000; Xu, 2000), scholars indicate that little IS research is informed through systems science (Demetis & Lee, 2016). \ \ We feel that state-of-the-art concepts and methods from fields that align with systems science can generate new, boundary-expanding research within the IS discipline. We attempt to accomplish this through a structured literature review of systems science concepts in distinguished IS publications as well as an examination of trends in recent systems science literature. Specifically, current literature spanning systems engineering, systems psychology, and system dynamics are explored. Our findings reveal that systems science concepts can provide multiple productive paths for future IS research. Furthermore, lessons learned through the deeper integration of systems thinking into other disciplines, such as operational research, can provide valuable lessons (e.g., Mingers & White, 2010). \ \ This TREO talk will present initial findings from this research-in-progress and encourage discussion concerning the examined models, methodologies, taxonomies and technologies
Assessing Water Sustainability Related to Hospitals Using System Dynamics Modeling
No full textAbstractWater is a critical but limited resource. As the population increases, the demand for this resource is growing. However, water needs to be sustained for current as well as future generations. Sustainability considers the balance between social, economic, and environmental factors. Hospitals are one of the major stakeholders within healthcare systems and one of the top users of water resources. This paper discusses a systems thinking approach to evaluate water sustainability related to hospitals and considers how different factors related to hospitals and water sustainability associate to each other. A system dynamics simulator is presented that models the behavior of different factors related to hospitals and water sustainability. The model can help decision makers make more informed decisions related to the factors that have an impact on water sustainability related to hospitals such as water reuse and water reduction. Information about the simulator is presented along with initial results using actual hospital data
Sustainable Smartphone-Based Healthcare Systems: A Systems Engineering Approach to Assess the Efficacy of Respiratory Monitoring Apps
No full textRecent technological developments along with advances in smart healthcare have been rapidly changing the healthcare industry and improving outcomes for patients. To ensure reliable smartphone-based healthcare interfaces with high levels of efficacy, a system dynamics model with sustainability indicators is proposed. The focus of this paper is smartphone-based breathing monitoring systems that could possibly use breathing sounds as the data acquisition input. This can especially be useful for the self-testing procedure of the ongoing global COVID-19 crisis in which the lungs are attacked and breathing is affected. The method of investigation is based on a systems engineering approach using system dynamics modeling. In this paper, first, a causal model for a smartphone-based respiratory function monitoring is introduced. Then, a systems thinking approach is applied to propose a system dynamics model of the smartphone-based respiratory function monitoring system. The system dynamics model investigates the level of efficacy and sustainability of the system by studying the behavior of various factors of the system including patient wellbeing and care, cost, convenience, user friendliness, in addition to other embedded software and hardware breathing monitoring system design and performance metrics (e.g., accuracy, real-time response, etc.). The sustainability level is also studied through introducing various indicators that directly relate to the three pillars of sustainability. Various scenarios have been applied and tested on the proposed model. The results depict the dynamics of the model for the efficacy and sustainability of smartphone-based breathing monitoring systems. The proposed ideas provide a clear insight to envision sustainable and effective smartphone-based healthcare monitoring systems.https://doi.org/10.3390/su1212506
A System Dynamics Perspective of Patient Satisfaction in Healthcare
No full textAbstractHealthcare systems face challenges including diminishing resources and increasing demands. The challenges need to be balanced in this complex system of systems to ensure a sustainable quality of life. Sustainability considers the needs of future generations without compromising the needs of current generations. The social component of sustainability is one of the important areas in healthcare sustainability. The social component focuses on considerations such as equity, empowerment, accessibility, participation, cultural identity, and institutional stability. Patient satisfaction is a key factor in the social element. Patient satisfaction represents patient fulfillment in regards to the cost, accessibility to services and resources, and patient wellbeing. It is analogous to ‘customer satisfaction’. A systems thinking approach is applied to analyze the social aspect in healthcare systems. This paper explores important factors and factor relationships in healthcare social sustainability related to patient satisfaction using a system dynamics approach
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Get PDFThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Get PDF“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Get PDFWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Get PDFWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
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