Assessment of surveys for the management of hospital clinical pharmacy services.
OBJECTIVE
Survey data sets are important sources of data, and their successful exploitation is of key importance for informed policy decision-making. We present how a survey analysis approach initially developed for customer satisfaction research in marketing can be adapted for an introduction of clinical pharmacy services into a hospital.


METHODS
We use a data mining analytical approach to extract relevant managerial consequences. We evaluate the importance of competences for users of a clinical pharmacy with the OrdEval algorithm and determine their nature according to the users' expectations. For this, we need substantially fewer questions than are required by the Kano approach.


RESULTS
From 52 clinical pharmacy activities we were able to identify seven activities with a substantial negative impact (i.e., negative reinforcement) on the overall satisfaction of clinical pharmacy services, and two activities with a strong positive impact (upward reinforcement). Using analysis of individual feature values, we identified six performance, 10 excitement, and one basic clinical pharmacists' activity.


CONCLUSIONS
We show how the OrdEval algorithm can exploit the information hidden in the ordering of class and attribute values, and their inherent correlation using a small sample of highly relevant respondents. The visualization of the outputs turns out highly useful in our clinical pharmacy research case study.
Pharmacy, University Medical Centre Ljubljana, Zaloška 7, 1000 Ljubljana, Slovenia. Electronic address: andreja.cufar@kclj.si.
Andreja
A
Čufar
Faculty of Pharmacy, University of Ljubljana, Aškerčeva 7, 1000 Ljubljana, Slovenia. Electronic address: ales.mrhar@ffa.uni-lj.si.
Aleš
A
Mrhar
Faculty of Computer and Information Science, University of Ljubljana, Večna pot 113, 1000 Ljubljana, Slovenia. Electronic address: marko.robnik@fri.uni-lj.si.
Marko
M
Robnik-Šikonja
D000465:Algorithms; D001291:Attitude of Health Personnel; D003258:Consumer Behavior; D057225:Data Mining / Q000379:methods*; D019538:Health Care Surveys; D007722:Health Knowledge, Attitudes, Practice; D006302:Health Services Research; D006801:Humans; D000069550:Machine Learning; D009741:Nursing Staff, Hospital / Q000523:psychology; D010595:Pharmacists / Q000458:organization & administration*; D010607:Pharmacy Service, Hospital / Q000458:organization & administration*; D010820:Physicians / Q000523:psychology; D024382:Professional Role; D011795:Surveys and Questionnaires
Clinical pharmacy; Human resource management; Kano model; OrdEval algorithm; Survey analysis