Improving the Effectiveness of Health Information Technology: The Case for Situational Analytics

Health information technology has contributed to improvements in quality and safety in clinical settings. However, the implementation of new technologies in health care has also been associated with the introduction of new sociotechnical hazards, produced through a range of complex interactions that vary with social, physical, temporal, and technological context. Other industries have been confronted with this problem and have developed advanced analytics to examine context-specific activities of workers and related outcomes. The skills and data exist in health care to develop similar insights through situational analytics, defined as the application of analytic methods to characterize human activity in situations and identify patterns in activity and outcomes that are influenced by contextual factors. This article describes the approach of situational analytics and potentially useful data sources, including trace data from electronic health record activity, reports from users, qualitative field data, and locational data. Key implementation requirements are discussed, including the need for collaboration among qualitative researchers and data scientists, organizational and federal level infrastructure requirements, and the need to implement a parallel research program in ethics to understand how the data are being used by organizations and policy makers.