Danny Toohey

An evaluation of hospital information systems integration approaches

Healthcare organisations aim to provide high-quality, cost-effective healthcare delivery; to do this they must manage a large amounts of information. A fundamental concern in health management is the integration of health information across distributed, heterogeneous and disparate information systems. Various integration approaches have been attempted by healthcare organizations to solve the problems associated with this integration. However, the variety of approaches means that selecting the appropriate integration approach is problematic. This paper aims to analyse and evaluate current integration approaches in the healthcare domain. It attempts to clarify the issues surrounding the adoption of integration solutions in this domain for both healthcare decision-makers and system integrators.

Engaging Academic Staff in Transnational Teaching: The Job Satisfaction Challenge

Transnational education (TNE) is an important facet of the international education learning and teaching landscape. Ensuring academics are positively engaged in TNE is a challenging but necessary issue for this form of educational provision if the risks inherent in TNE are to be successfully mitigated. This article explores job satisfaction for academics using the job characteristics model (JCM) to better understand the conditions that influence their involvement with TNE. The results highlight the important role that teaching-related interaction with host-country students and staff (the Feedback and Task Significance JCM dimensions) plays in academics’ satisfaction. Feelings of ownership and control of the TNE course (Autonomy and Task Identity) were also shown to be important determinants of satisfaction. It is therefore recommended that these aspects of TNE be encouraged and supported through university procedures and policies. Similarly, those aspects of TNE teaching that contribute to dissatisfaction, such as additional administration, need to be better understood, managed, and their impact mitigated where possible.

Enabling commodity environmental sensor networks using multi-attribute combinatorial marketplaces

Large scale distributed e-infrastructures are emerging as commodity resource platforms. The next generation of commodity e-infrastructures will encapsulate the physical or tangible world by integrating ubiquitous sensors. Cheap environmental and physiological sensors are being increasingly deployed by many commercial organisations. The process of discovering and accessing commercially available resources requires a market for providers and consumers to trade these resources. This paper argues that developing a market will encourage the commoditisation of environmental sensor networks. It presents an overall architecture and adopts algorithms to support the trading of commodity environmental sensor networks.