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The desire to access personal and high-quality health information electronically is increasing, not only in Canada, but globally. With the advent of the COVID - 19 pandemic the desire and demand for telemedicine and timely access to personal health data such as online laboratory (lab) results has increased substantially. This study examines citizens' perspectives of being provided with high-quality information about a specific lab test (i.e., potassium) in the same display as a trend graph. Therefore, the objective of this study is to test how participants managed this additional information about the context of the test, understood, and applied it. The researchers analyzed the responses of semistructured interviews with Canadian participants (N=24) using conventional content analysis. This paper examined four themes related to providing complementary information concurrently with lab results in the same display: 1) Benefits of Collocated Information, 2) Information Overload, 3) Misinterpretation, 4) Confusion. This study provided examples of some of the difficulties that the participants faced accessing their lab values online, while navigating and discerning complimentary high-quality health information available in their patient portal. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Information technologies have the potential to increase the safety of healthcare and advance safety science. However, it is now well known that health information systems may also inadvertently introduce new forms of error known as technology-induced error. Such errors may be difficult to detect as they may only appear under conditions of system use in real healthcare settings. In this paper, the authors explore the use and assessment of recall and safety alerts for both identifying and learning from technology-induced error. Publically available safety and recall reports from Canada were analyzed to identify opportunities to improve organizational learning from technology-induced errors. Although a range of error types were identified, it was found that none of the reports provided detailed information about the underlying technical circumstances that led to the need for a recall. Implications for future reporting systems to support learning from technology-induced error are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Significant changes in the structure of research in the biomedical sciences in North America have parallelled increases in research funding in this area over the past few decades. A typical lab in the 1960s was comprised of a professor, and perhaps a technician or graduate student, but many labs now have 20 or more members, most of which are graduate students and postdocs. Despite the dependence of academic scientists in the U.S. and Canada on external research funding, no studies have examined the relationship between social organization of research and the structure of research funding. In this paper, evidence gathered from more than 70 in-depth work history interviews during an ethnographic study of the work of graduate students, postdocs, professors and technicians in biomedical labs at two leading Canadian universities in 2002 and 2003 shows how the changing structure of federal research funding over the past few decades was related to major changes in the social organization of work in biomedical labs. The findings suggest that the social organization of research where faculty members are dependent on external funding cannot be fully understood without examining the dynamic constraints and opportunities associated with that funding in specific institutional and historical contexts. Since the reaction of many countries, including Canada and the U.S., to the increasing commercial value of research has been to substantially increase funding in the biomedical sciences, it will be important to understand the processes by which changes in funding have affected the organization of research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]