Methods for investigating decision making in health care network meetings

Abstract

Objective: To demonstrate a method of describing and analysing the interactions between people engaged in decision making in health care network meetings. Method: Analysis of the meeting interaction involved three steps: recording the meeting, annotating the verbal interactions of the meeting, and calculating various metrics from the annotations. Each annotation represented one utterance by one person. Annotations were assigned start and end times and an associated behaviour from four mutually exclusive behaviour categories. We used software and algorithms developed for this process at the Australian e-Health Research Centre. Results: A meeting interaction fingerprint was produced from one meeting, which consisted of a set of metrics describing different aspects of the interaction between participants in the meeting. Conclusions: Creating meeting fingerprints and analysing the interactions between meeting participants has the potential to provide feedback to improve decision making in health care network teams.