Gokul Bhandari

The Demographics of Overconfidence

As is well-known, investors are subject to overconfidence. Using a survey of about 2,000 defined contribution pension plan members, we not only corroborate this, but also explore the demographics of this behavioral flaw. Noting that overconfidence can be partitioned into certainty and knowledge, we find that highly-educated males who are nearing retirement, who have received investment advice, and who have experience investing for themselves, tend to have a higher certainty level. For some groups knowledge matches certainty. Because highly-educated males do not have higher levels of knowledge we conclude that they are more subject to overconfidence.

Debiasing investors with decision support systems: An experimental investigation

This research presents evidence that decision support systems can play an important role in debiasing behaviorally-challenged investors. An empirical study involving 119 participants provides strong evidence for the existence of cognitive biases in investment decision making and demonstrates the effectiveness of decision aids in lowering the negative impact of such biases on the ability of investors to make sound investment decisions. Additionally, such decision aids are shown to be more valuable in decision environments where the bias level is likely to be higher.

Meeting community needs through leadership and innovation: a case of virtual psychiatric emergency department (ED)

In this paper, we discuss a telehealth project aimed at delivering mental health crisis interventions to patients in two rural hospitals in Southern Ontario, Canada, by creating a virtual psychiatric emergency department (ED) using telehealth technology. A participatory action research approach was followed as a design framework for this project. A formal process based on Kouzes and Posners five practices of exemplary leadership was crafted and closely followed, given the critical role of leadership necessary for the success of this project. The programme achieved its goal and was well received by patients and staff. ED physicians felt supported by the available psychiatric and mental health nursing expertise. Staff satisfaction with the protocols and processes were high, and ED physicians felt confident in the support they received during the decision-making process for appropriate disposition of the patient.

Design of a patient-centric, service-oriented health care navigation system for a local health integration network

Efficient and timely access to health care services has a profound impact on the well-being of individuals. A local health integration network (LHIN) located in South-western Ontario, Canada, is mandated to plan, identify, integrate, and fund regional health care services through its 88 member agencies. However, for the public, it is difficult to locate the right services at the right time due to the absence of a system-level navigation tool. In this ongoing system design project, we discuss a proposed patient-centric, service-oriented navigation system to be used by the public for accessing the regional health care services funded by the LHIN. We also propose that basic building blocks of service design be incorporated into the unified theory of acceptance and use of technology for developing an evaluative framework for assessing the impact of service design elements on the user’s acceptance and usage of technology such as our web-based health care navigation tool.

Towards a “Just-in-Time” Distributed Decision Support System in Health Care Research

The application of semi-automated decision support systems in health care faces challenging tasks mainly in generating evidence-based recommendations in a short critical time window. Traditional data collection and survey methodology to generate evidence for the decision support systems also suffers from a slow turn-around time. This chapter reports on a multi-disciplinary project between computer and health sciences to introduce a cumulative framework encapsulating innovative distributed data collection methodology, coupled with an intelligent multi-agent, socially driven decision support system. We report on the current design and implementation aspects of this integrated system with a case study in injury prevention to verify the initial model.

Agent-Based Modeling and Simulation as a Tool for Decision Support for Managing Patient Falls in a Dynamic Hospital Setting

Patient falls are one of the most reported safety incidents in North American hospitals and their management is a critical healthcare priority because of their adverse impact on patient welfare as well as being a potential cause for litigation. Agent-based modeling and simulation has been widely used in healthcare as a tool for decision support. This paper discusses empirical findings from such a simulation study designed to understand the impact of critical nursing service parameters such as interaction time delay, number of nursing staff available for work, shift duration (8 h vs. 12 h), and patient acuity level on the percentage of patients successfully served in a timely manner by the nurses, thereby lowering the potential falls by the patients.

Adoption of Open Source Software in Healthcare

The Open Source (OS) platform is a new paradigm for software development in which several parties serve as volunteers in the design, coding, testing, debugging, distribution, and documentation of OS software projects. Open source software (OSS) is experiencing an exponential growth in several industries such as finance, sales and marketing, pharmaceuticals, and manufacturing. However, the adoption of OSS in healthcare has been slow despite the availability of several quality applications for the healthcare industry. In this paper, we outline the salient characteristics of OSS, including the development process for OSS, license types, and revenue models, and then discuss major factors that affect the uptake of OSS by organizations. With a detailed discussion of BI (Business Intelligence) and other open source applications available in healthcare, we conclude that the adoption of OSS in healthcare requires a comprehensive understanding of not only the needs of the healthcare sector, the types and complexities of OS applications, and how they interact with various organizational factors.

A Framework for Open Assurance of Learning

Assurance of Learning (AOL) refers to the outcomes assessment process which involves the systematic collection, review, and use of information about educational programs undertaken for the purpose of improving student learning and development [8]. While emerging trends such as open education, open learning, learning analytics, academic analytics, and big data in education have recently become mainstream, studies regarding the design and development of open source analytics applications for AOL are non-existent. In this paper, we describe an application called AOL Analyzer that we developed for our business school last year to assist in the analysis of AOL results reported by faculty. To the best of our knowledge, this is a first paper to bridge the existing gap in AOL analytics research.

Design and Implementation of a Primary Health Care Services Navigational System Architecture

We report on development of a primary health care data navigation decision support system. The system was designed around four primary services, including data entry, query support, gap analysis and report generation. The context for development required a centralized approach to deal with security issues of access, data integrity and privacy and the PHC DSS was intended for use by a restricted group of policy analysts and decision makers. We focus primarily on the abstractions to data entry, query support, and the approach to interface design and functionality.

Corrigendum: Corrigendum to Debiasing investors with decision support systems: An experimental investigation [Decision Support Systems Volume (46/1) 399-410]

Corrigendum to “Debiasing investors with decision support systems: An experimental investigation” [Decision Support Systems Volume (46/1) 399–410] Gokul Bhandari , Richard Deaves , Khaled Hassanein c,⁎ a Department of Management Science and Marketing, Odette School of Business, University of Windsor, ON, Canada b Finance and Business Economics Area, DeGroote School of Business, McMaster University, Hamilton, ON, Canada c Information Systems Area, DeGroote School of Business, McMaster University, Hamilton, ON, Canada