Topic and Research Questions - Essay Example

Electronic Record Keeping and Health Care Providers RESEARCH LAB 2: DR. Y HAS EXPLORED ELECTRONIC RECORD KEEPING FOR HEALTH CARE PROVIDERS IN RELATION TO PATIENT OUTCOMES.1. What are the attitudes and perceptions of health care providers as concerns the use of electronic record keeping in medical practice?This is a qualitative research question. A qualitative research is a kind of systematic empirical inquiry into meaning. This is because the research is ordered or planned, following specific rules that are defined by members of a given community.

The research is grounded in the world of experiences that members of a given community have gone through. The research therefore intends to find out what people make sense of these experiences (Yin 7). Therefore qualitative research involves a qualitative and naturalistic approach and this means that the researcher has to study things in their natural settings, attempt to look further into them and make sense of them, and interpret them in terms of the meanings people bring to them (Yin 7).In this question the research will aim to find out what the health care providers think about the use of the electronic record keeping in medical practice.

It attempts to find out the feelings that they have on whether electronic record keeping has led to improvements in their service delivery, if it has affected their delivery of care to their patients and generally what they think of electronic record keeping in relation to other methods of record keeping available for use by them.2. What is the rate of adoption and use of electronic record keeping across US hospitals in their bid to improve efficiency in medical practice?This is a quantitative research question.

Quantitative research tends to focus on measurement and proof of phenomena. This type of research adopts a scientific approach to research that goes through a specific process. The scientific process is based on the premise that a phenomenon is only meaningful or of value if it can be observed and counted. Qualitative research is characterized by numerical data which allows for a variety of statistical analysis (Gravetter and Forzano). Many researches have employed this method because of the fact that it is objective and easier to interpret figures than interpreting feelings and emotions or perceptions of people or phenomena.

This type of research basically employs questionnaires and surveys in data collection before analysis. Usually a large portion of the population is surveyed so that the results portray a representative sample of the whole population (Gravetter and Forzano 157-158).This question therefore aims to conduct a survey on the US hospitals by counting how many hospitals have adopted and are using the electronic record keeping. Actually a variety of hospitals may be surveyed in this research to identify how many of them use the electronic health records.

The rate of adoption can be arrived at by finding out the number of hospitals that are using the electronic health records in a given population and which ones are not using them over a certain period of time. This will generate figures that will show whether the rate was slow, fast or average.Works CitedGravetter, Frederick J. and Lori-Ann B. Forzano. Research Methods for the Behavioural Sciences. Belmont, CA: Cengage Learning, 2010.Yin, Robert K. Qualitative Research from Start to finish. New York: Guilford Press, 2011.