<p>This thesis has created an image of the exchange of information among teachers in the Swedish upper secondary school. The study indicates that the exchange of information seems to be limited at all levels and the exchange that takes place outside the own teaching team occurs mainly through teachers personal networks. The study also shows barriers that may exist and the opportunities that an increased exchange may generate. From the picture that the empirical material provides and the theory that is presented a discussion is made around how IT can best support the organizational learning in schools. A concrete proposal is that at national level an IT platform should be created, which primarily focuses on materials that are created by its users and has an open architecture with a single login.</p>

<p><em>In this paper we analyze a social network specifically designed for the elderly, people with Dementia and people with generally low computer experience. This is a relatively unexplored use for such software, and our goal is to find out whether the technique to be used is simple enough to use for the intended user group, and generally how the whole situation is experienced by the users. To achieve this we conducted an expert evaluation and interviewed a number of users at two separate occasions during their first weeks with Modernfamilies. We came to the conclusion that this software generally is simple enough to use for the intended target group. Some of the users we came in contact with experienced the software as a positive addition to their daily lives, while some could not see any reason for a further use. During our own tests we found that Modernfamilies is indeed user friendly, but that it also has a number of technical shortcomings.</em></p>

<p>Certifications is common for IT in relation to individual program languages or program applications. Certifications for educations that endures several years is not as common to see. In this paper the situation for the Systems Science programme is researched, by investigating how the programme looks around in Sweden. Also by using interviews, show how companies and people responsible for the programme in Umeå, think the contact is between them and how the knowledge of the Systems Science students are from the view of the companies that employ them. In the end the conclusions show that there are differences in the Systems Science programme, and that the companies have quite a similar view of what the Systems Science students are good and not so good at. The contact between the industry and the programme does exist, but have to improve. When taken all the aspects in hand, and by seeing the positive thoughts that involved people have on the idea of including a certification in the programme, the final conclusion is that a certification is something that would benefit the Systems Science programme.</p>

Background: Clinicians use information regularly in clinical care. New electronic information resources provided in push, pull, and prompting formats have potential to improve information support but have not been designed for individualization. Physicians with differing risk status use healthcare resources differently often without an improvement in outcomes. Questions: Do physicians who are risk seeking or risk avoiding and comfortable or uncomfortable with uncertainty use or prefer electronic information resources differently when answering simulated clinical questions and can the processes be modeled with existing theoretical models? Design: Cohort study. Methods: Primary care physicians in Canada and the United States were screened for risk status. Those with high and low scores on 2 validated scales answered 23 multiple-choice questions and searched for information using their own electronic resources for 2 of these questions. They also answered 2 other questions using information from 2 electronic information sources: PIER© and Clinical Evidence© . Results: The physicians did not differ for number of correct answers according to risk status although the number of correct answers was low and not substantially higher than chance. Their searching process was consistent with 2 information-seeking models from information science (modified Wilson Problem Solving and Card/Pirolli Information Foraging/Information Scent models). Few differences were seen for any electronic searching or information use outcome based on risk status although those physicians who were comfortable with uncertainty used more searching heuristics and spent less effort on direct searching. More than 20% of answers were changed after searchingalmost the same number going from incorrect to correct and from correct to incorrect. These changes from a correct to incorrect answer indicate that some electronic information resources may not be ideal for direct clinical care or integration into electronic medical record systems. Conclusions: Risk status may not be a major factor in the design of electronic information resources for primary care physicians. More research needs to be done to determine which computerized information resources and which features of these resources are associated with obtaining and maintaining correct answers to clinical questions.

Community health assessment (CHA) professionals who use information technology need a complete system that is capable of supporting numerical-spatial problem solving. On-Line Analytical Processing (OLAP) is a multidimensional data warehouse technique that is commonly used as a decision support system in standard industry. Coupling OLAP with Geospatial Information System (GIS) offers the potential for a very powerful system. For this work, OLAP and GIS were combined to develop the Spatial OLAP Visualization and Analysis Tool (SOVAT) for numerical-spatial problem solving. In addition to the development of this system, this dissertation describes three studies in relation to this work: a usability study, a CHA survey, and a summative evaluation. The purpose of the usability study was to identify human-computer interaction issues. Fifteen participants took part in the study. Three participants per round used the system to complete typical numerical-spatial tasks. Objective and subjective results were analyzed after each round and system modifications were implemented. The result of this study was a novel OLAP-GIS system streamlined for the purposes of numerical-spatial problem solving. The online CHA survey aimed to identify the information technology currently used for numerical-spatial problem solving. The survey was sent to CHA professionals and allowed for them to record the individual technologies they used during specific steps of a numerical-spatial routine. In total, 27 participants completed the survey. Results favored SPSS for numerical-related steps and GIS for spatial-related steps. Next, a summative within-subjects crossover design compared SOVAT to the combined use of SPSS and GIS (termed SPSS-GIS) for numerical-spatial problem solving. Twelve individuals from the health sciences at the University of Pittsburgh participated. Half were randomly selected to use SOVAT first, while the other half used SPSS-GIS first. In the second session, they used the alternate application. Objective and subjective results favored SOVAT over SPSS-GIS. Inferential statistics were analyzed using linear mixed model analysis. At the .01 level, SOVAT was statistically significant from SPSS-GIS for satisfaction and time (p < .002). The results demonstrate the potential for OLAP-GIS in CHA analysis. Future work will explore the impact of an OLAP-GIS system in other areas of public health.

Statistics indicate an increase in online shopping. This indication could result in the loss of safety factors for the customer, for example the possibility to physically examine the product, interact with professional store personnel and try the product before purchase – factors which all could support the customer in her choice of company and product. The purpose of this study is to increase the theoretical knowledge regarding strategies in the area of trust-development between customers and companies. We have chosen to investigate what strategies web based companies apply and how they are perceived by their customers. Thus, we conduct our study on a market leading company, selling quality-demanding products, to investigate how they apply trust-development strategies. To be able to understand the inner workings of e-commerce and how trust-development is created, we will present the history of e- commerce as well as the concept of web 2.0 and their impact on customers and companies acting in the e-commerce market. To answer our research questions and sub-purposes we have applied a three-step method containing a literature study, an observational study and focus groups. Results of the study indicate that the existing general strategies in the area of trust-development are applicable, however they lack certain important components according to customers. The most prominent results of the study show that the design of web sites and web-shops is of utmost importance to the customers and thus should be integrated into previously developed strategies.

The manufactory industry, due to decline in profit margins, is seeking new business opportunities by moving towards servitization and value-adding services in after-sales. We have therefore conducted a case study to investigate a manufacturing company in their current transformation towards servitization. By studying the management perspective, we aimed to understand how Information Technology, by adding value, could play a role in the transformation process. This study shows that information technology can take an integrating role, by supporting new value-adding services to provider and customer, as well as a co-creating role, where both provider and customer benefits by learning from each other, in the changing work process initiated by new services. The study has also shown that Information Technology, together with organization, information and people, are crucial components in the manufactory industry’s transformation towards servitization.  Furthermore, the study has also shown that the value chain has the potential to drastically change due to the value-adding that the information technology brings to the progress of servitization.

BIOMEDICAL INFORMATICS DESIGN AND IMPLEMENTATION OF A COMPUTERIZED INFORMATICS TOOL TO FACILITATE CLINICIAN ACCESS TO A STATES PRESCRIPTION DRUG MONITORING PROGRAM DATABASE STEVEN JOHN WHITE Thesis under the direction of Professor Dario Giuse Within the past decade, prescription drug abuse has emerged as a nationwide epidemic, with opioid-related poisoning deaths more than tripling since 1999. In an effort to bring this public health crisis under control, 43 states, including Tennessee, have enacted prescription drug monitoring programs (PDMPs), computerized databases of DEA-controlled substance prescriptions filled at pharmacies within the given state. Such programs have been found to be effective in curbing prescription opioid abuse by alerting prescribers to aberrant prescription-filling activity. However, they are commonly underutilized and have workflow barriers that impede clinical use. Ideally, PDMP queries could be generated seamlessly from within a medical enterprises electronic health record (EHR) system, using an application-programming interface (API) supplied by the states PDMP vendor. However, the enabling legislative language currently prohibits such access. Therefore, we developed and evaluated a Perl software program activated from within Vanderbilt University Medical Centers EHR patient chart to send the properly coded/formatted user and patient-demographic information packets to the Tennessee PDMP website, without the use of an API. The program parses the returned data file for important prescription information and displays the filtered information to the user. By allowing the query to occur in the background, the users tether time to the computer is decreased from 3 minutes to 10 seconds per query. During the evaluation phase, we used a quasi-experimental intervention design with two alternating 2-week control and intervention periods. Twenty-eight ED attending physicians participated in the study and queried the PDMP at their clinical discretion. During integrated PDMP query tool availability, 5.9 % (169/2844) of emergency department patients were screened compared with 2.2 % (62/2786) during periods when the tool was not available (p<0.001, Pearsons Chi square). Data was not viewed in 20% of integrated tool assisted queries. The EHR-integrated PDMP query tool was well regarded by study physicians as an enhancement to workflow.

The Biochemical Library (BCL) is a protein structure prediction algorithm developed in the Meiler Lab at Vanderbilt University based on the placement of secondary structure elements. This algorithm can use experimental data such as nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR), Cryo-electron microscopy (CryoEM), and electron paramagnetic resonance (EPR), to assist in protein structure prediction but does not have the ability to use SAXS data. The first phase of my project was to add this capability to the BCL and create a SAXS compatibility score. GPU acceleration was used to parallelize the computations. The second phase of the project was to compute SAXS scores for protein models without side chain and loop region coordinate information, but preserve atom type information. Finally, the BCL::SAXS score was added to the minimization process in BCL::FOLD. The SAXS score can be used to filter erroneous initial protein models from further refinement, thus saving time and computation resources.

Objective: Supervised machine learning methods have shown good performance in text classification tasks in the biomedical domain, but they often require large annotated corpora, which are costly to develop. Our goal is to assess whether active learning strategies can be integrated with supervised machine learning methods, thus reducing the annotation cost while keeping or improving the quality of classification models for biomedical text. Methods: We have applied active learning to two biomedical natural language processing (NLP) tasks: 1) the assertion classification task in the 2010 i2b2/VA Clinical NLP Challenge, which was to determine the assertion status of clinical concepts; and 2) a supervised word sense disambiguation (WSD) task that was to disambiguate 197 ambiguous words and abbreviations in MEDLINE abstracts. We developed Support Vector Machines (SVMs) based classifiers for both tasks. We then implemented several existing and newly developed active learning algorithms to integrate with SVM classifiers and evaluated their performance on both tasks. Results: In assertion classification task, our results showed that to achieve the same classification performance, active learning strategies required much fewer samples than the random sampling method. For example, to achieve an AUC of 0.79, the random sampling method used 32 samples, while our best active learning algorithm required only 12 samples, a reduction of 62.5% in manual annotation effort. In the WSD task, our results also demonstrated that active learners significantly outperformed the passive learner, showing better performance for 177 out of 197 (89.8%) ambiguous terms. Further analysis showed that to achieve an average accuracy of 90%, the passive learner needed 38 samples, while the active learners needed only 24 annotated samples, a 37% reduction of annotation effort. Moreover, we also analyzed cases where active learning algorithms did not achieve superior performance and summarized three causes: (1) poor model in early learning stage; (2) easy WSD cases; and (3) difficult WSD cases, which provide useful insight for future improvements. Conclusion: Both studies demonstrated that integrating active learning strategies with supervised learning methods could effectively reduce annotation cost and improve the classification models in biomedical text processing.