Health IT

Results of Health IT survey

Started by Joaquin Blaya, PhD on 06 Aug 2011

Hi everyone,

We're excited to share a summary of results from the GHDonline health IT community survey conducted this spring.

We'd like to thank everyone who completed the survey. The answers were extremely useful and will guide what we do in the health IT community. Your feedback was particularly timely, as the GHDonline team is working on revamping the site. As part of the redesign process, we are reviewing the current approaches and user interface and exploring changes to offer members an even more valuable resource.

Before we get to the survey results, here are some quick facts about the GHDonline Health IT community.

? We are 1,760 members representing 900 organizations in 120 countries.
? Top countries for membership are United States (802), India (90), Kenya (61), Rwanda: (56), Nigeria (44), South Africa (43), Tanzania (38), Haiti (37), Canada (29), and Pakistan (28)
? The top content contributors are Joaquin Blaya, Om Goeckermann, Hamish Fraser, Terry Hannan and Jessica Haberer.

And now... the survey results. Forty-eight members responded.

For the different aspects of the community, members found that on a scale of 1 (not useful) to 5 (very useful), discussions about Articles (average 4.17) and Panels (3.83) were useful, where as posts about Job Opportunities (2.96) and Competitions (2.70) were not as useful.

Response: We'll try to limit the number of competition and job posts that we place in the community and place more emphasis on articles, panels and member spotlights.

Members have broad interests across the spectrum of Health IT since all categories received high scores: Design and Development (3.88), Implementation (4.17), Evaluation (3.94) and Use (4.35).

Where did members learn about GHDonline?
44% from the Internet, 38% from a colleague/friend, 17% from a professional organization, and 10% from school/university.

Respondents offered many useful suggestions to improve GHDonline. We have already started employing some of them and will continue exploring more in the future.

The most notable suggestions included:

Suggestion: Have list of recommended websites for additional information.

Response: We began a discussion entitled "Useful Documents and Links" regarding specific topics such as standards, open source software, SMS systems and others. We will keep adding different topics and invite you to contribute as well if you have resources that might be useful.

Suggestion: More updates on e-health and telemedicine

Response: We think this is of great importance, however, GHDonline exists to foster collaboration between members, rather than serve as a news and update distribution service. Several great sites and email lists already do this well. I believe having members discuss how they keep updated would be a great topic for a discussion.

Suggestion: Have more resources or articles in Spanish.

Response: GHDonline employs Google Translate in an effort to make the site usable in other languages. We are currently working on making the website even easier to translate. We are also working on having emails be translated to the user's preferred language and will update all members on our progress. We will lookout for more materials in Spanish and other languages.

Most of the resources and value of GHDonline comes from our members, and so we encourage our Spanish-speaking members to contribute materials and discussions they consider interesting, and post them in Spanish or other language.

Suggestion: Connect people in same region to foster partnerships.

Response: This is a great idea, and one we know we need to work on. Due to privacy rules, we cannot share members' email addresses. For starters with our new redesign, we're working to make it easier to find members of your community by geographic location, interest, and professional role. There are likely many other creative ways we could make it easier for members to connect without violating privacy of their contact info. Please write any suggestions or examples from other sites in the comments. We'd love to improve this aspect of the site.

Thanks for all these great suggestions. If you have more feedback, please respond to this discussion. We're always looking for ways to improve the site and community experience. We may not be able to implement them all right away, but we believe in constant iteration and value your ideas.

Warm regards,

The GHDonline Team