My Phd Study

My study focuses on an aspect of NHS Connecting for Health Electronic Health Record system.  The study builds upon a collaboration between NHS Connecting for Health (CFH), the developers of the NHS Electronic Health Record (EHR) and the University of Huddersfield.  The existing work has developed electronic discharge report exemplars based on clinical information drawn from anonymised patient case records. The development to date now requires refinement in order to ensure the meanings (semantics), context and intentions (pragmatics) contained in discharge summary reports will be captured by the information technology system. 

The research will use a qualitative case study approach.  Anonymised patient case records will be used by participating volunteer clinicians to generate discharge summary reports (DSR). Case records from a number of specialities ranging from uncomplicated clinical care to those of increasing complexity will be selected. Volunteer clinician participants will be asked to create a DSR based on a patient case using a template (Royal College of Physicians [RCP]) designed to standardise content.

Subsequently, they will be interviewed to discuss the semantic and pragmatic aspects contained in the report. The unit of study is the template based DSR, the original DSR from the anonymised case records and the interview transcript. All data will be analysed thematically to identify the relationships between the expressions in the reports and their underlying semantic and pragmatic aspects. The template DSR will then be translated (coded) into an electronic version.

The translation process will allow the evaluation of capabilities and limitations of current health information technology and standards to capture the semantic and pragmatic aspects of this form of clinical communication. The study will contribute to a better understanding of the semantic and pragmatic aspects of clinical communication and inform how current health information technology and standards can be improved