This week’s assignment is designed to develop your health information literacy skills while at the same time learning about the needs for research development in the discipline of health informatics.

This week’s assignment is designed to develop your health information literacy skills while at the same time learning about the needs for research development in the discipline of health informatics. As a health informaticist, your work may include working on a team to solve a specific informatics problem. As such, it may be necessary for you to gather information about the problem. Hence this assignment will focus on applying a search strategy in PubMed, describing your results and then analyzing the significance of the findings for a research article that you located.

Please log on to PubMed through the my.scranton.edu portal. Details on library searching can be found in the Health Informatics Research Guide as well as tips for searching. Note that there are two versions of PubMed, the legacy (older) version and a newer version. It may be easier to search in the legacy PubMed. However, the newer version has a “cite” feature. You can search in the legacy version and then, when you want to cite your article, you can retrieve the article in the newer version. You can then get the APA citation for the article. Note that the default is AMA format and you will have to use a drop down menu to change it to APA. Once you have the citation, you most likely have to make corrections to the format.

Create an NCBI account so that you can save your search terms. This is a feature available in the upper right-hand corner of the PubMed screen. This is important so that you will be able to repeat your search, obtaining new information at a later date. This will also allow you to save your PubMed searches. Select one of the topics identified as a need for health informatics research (See narrated PowerPoint lecture 1 and the Carayon, Haux and Mettler articles on ERES for ideas). Search for a research article that is less than two years old and analyze the research presented in the article. Remember, a research article is one where the authors actually carried out a study to obtain new knowledge.

• AMIA Competencies: F7
• Program Outcomes: 1, 4
• Student Learning Outcomes: 1, 7

Guidelines for the Written Assignment

Provide an introduction by describing how you decided on your topic and why it is important, your search terms, any terms to limit or expand your topic. For example, if your initial search yielded thousands of articles, you will need to limit the number of articles returned. You could limit by years, or type of research. On the other hand, if you get almost no articles that are useful, you may have to change your terms or consider changing your topic for this assignment.

You may choose to select a topic for health informatics research that is focused on people and organizations and the ultimate user of health information and technologies. To narrow this focus, you may couple the topic you choose with the driver of risk that you used in the first week’s assignment or a specific community/population health topic (e.g. diabetes, heart failure, immunizations, etc.). Indicate how many articles you obtained and how you chose the article of interest. Then, locate the full-text of the article (share how you found it). For the article, provide a very short summary and describe how you think it addresses the health informatics problem. Then, analyze the significance of the findings. Here are some questions that may be considered in your discussion as appropriate for the article chosen: What were the challenges in implementing this research study? Do you think that the results are promising in addressing the identified problem? Is the research ready for implementation? Could or should it be implemented in similar settings? What disciplines would be involved in the implementation? What role does the health informaticist play in the implementation? What challenges might you see in applying the results of the research? Does this research address the Quadruple Aim of health care, if so how? How does this research address a health informatics research or community health/population need? How does this research address an identified need? Other sources may be included to support your analysis.

APA Format required. This includes citing the chosen article and other supporting materials in the reference list and citing appropriately within the text. Please note, the focus of the assignment is your search strategy and your analysis of the study’s findings for health informatics. Therefore, keep your summary of the results brief.