Document Engineering and Information Architecture (INFO 243)

Assignment 6: Document Analysis

Author(s):
Bob Glushko
glushko@ischool.berkeley.edu

Course: Document Engineering and Information Architecture (INFO 243)
Date: 9 April 2007
Title: Assignment 6: Document Analysis
This assignment gives you practice at document analysis and in relating document analysis to business process analysis.

This assignment is due by 9am on Wednesday April 18. Turn in your work (with your name in both the filename and in the content) by uploading a file on the course syllabus page.

Because some of you have legitimately complained about my "hypocrisy" to tell you that "friends don't let friends model alone" while requiring you to do your assignments solo, I am proposing two different ways for you to do this assignment.

If you plan ahead on this assignment so you're not doing it at the last minute, you are welcome to find someone else with which to do it. But this means that in Activity 1 instead of having a "Components x Information Sources" table with three columns, you will be starting with six, because each of you will have analyzed the three sources and you'll have the benefit and problem of having to reconcile those two views of the same source. You will do this consolidation in Activity 2, and from then on you can work together.

Otherwise you can do this assignment yourself.

The context in which you are doing the analysis is the creation of prescriptions by physicians and their use by patients and pharmacies. Your document engineering challenge is to create the information model for an electronic "prescription writer," a software application for physicians to enable them to write prescriptions more effectively. You will analyze three information sources:

Source 1: Blank Prescription (generic one, loosely copied from Tang Health Center, UC Berkeley), (http://courses.ischool.berkeley.edu/i243/s07/assignments/prescription-generic.gif)

Source 2: "Key Characteristics of an Electronic Prescription Writer," Robert Keet. (http://www.axolotl.com/press/cs/keet200307/). Treat this article as an interview with Dr. Keet.

Source 3: "eRx Now," Online Product Demo from National ePrescribing Patient Safety Initiative (http://www.nationalerx.com/). Demo is linked from this page. Your harvest table for this source should be based on the screen shots and commentary in the demo.

ACTIVITY 1: For each of the three information sources, create a "Harvest Table" for the content components in a prescription using as an example the spreadsheets (http://groups.sims.berkeley.edu/sylvia/docs/reports/appendices/) for each of the course syllabi analyzed in the "Modeling SylViA" paper. You can use a spreadsheet, HTML table, or any other mechanism you choose to organize the information. Fill out each row as completely as you can; the name of the "Candidate Component" should be whatever name is used in the document instance or other information source that you're analyzing and the columns should capture any other information about datatype, possible values, and so on that enables you to understand what the component means.

I usually recommend that harvesting be done at the most granular level to identify the "primitive" content components. It is hard to avoid noticing that these contents are often found in aggregate or composite structures (like Addess, which is a typical aggregate of Number, Street, City, etc). Make a note about this in your table, but don't spend a lot of time with this because normally you wouldn't deal with aggregates until after the Consolidation activity.

And to minimize the amount of "busywork," you are hereby instructed that you DON'T need to "fill out each row as completely as you can" for any "horizontal" component that isn't specific to the medical domain of this assignment (i.e., focus on the domain-specific semantics and don't worry about full documentation for "City," "PostalCode," etc.).

Ideally, you would talk with physcians, medical office staff, pharmacists, and other designers and users of the prescription forms and applications, but for the purposes of this assignment you do NOT need to analyze or consider anything you can't learn from the sources listed. This is a additional simplification to make the assignment less demanding and to encourage more comparability of your analyses.

ACTIVITY 2 : Create a "Consolidated Table of Content Components" like that in the appendices to the Modeling SylViA paper or Figure 12-13 in the Document Engineering text. Make the very coarse distinction between those that are essential or mandatory in the model used by an electronic prescription writer and "everything else."

ACTIVITY 3: This is a domain where validation is extremely important; people can die if the wrong values get into a prescription. Identify any domain-specific code sets or other controls on possible values for information components to create more constraints and validation opportunities for your model.

ACTIVITY 4: The Keet article and the eRx demo are much richer information sources than the sample prescription so we need to analyze them more carefully. These two information sources in combination describe the end-to-end flow of information for prescriptions, starting with information used by the physician to write prescriptions, the prescription created, and the use of the prescription by the pharmacy. Create a list of the processes that interact or co-occur with prescriptions, either to provide information that a prescription writer application could use, or to use information created by the prescription writer. You should give each process a short name and a one-sentence description.

ACTIVITY 5: For each of the processes that you identified in Activity 4, identify an existing or potential document type that would "package" the information produced by the process and identify the processes that use each document.