Understanding the impacts of health information systems on patient flow management: A systematic review across several decades of research

Quy Nguyen; Michael Wybrow; Frada Burstein; David Taylor; Joanne Enticott

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0274493

Peer Review History

Original SubmissionMay 17, 2022
22 Jun 2022 Decision Letter - Yong-Hong Kuo, Editor PONE-D-22-14339Understanding the impacts of health information systems on patient flow management: A systematic review across several decades of researchPLOS ONE Dear Dr. Nguyen, Thank you for submitting your manuscript to PLOS ONE. After careful consideration, we feel that it has merit but does not fully meet PLOS ONE’s publication criteria as it currently stands. Therefore, we invite you to submit a revised version of the manuscript that addresses the points raised during the review process. Please submit your revised manuscript by Aug 06 2022 11:59PM. If you will need more time than this to complete your revisions, please reply to this message or contact the journal office at plosone@plos.org. When you're ready to submit your revision, log on to https://www.editorialmanager.com/pone/ and select the 'Submissions Needing Revision' folder to locate your manuscript file. 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We will update your Data Availability statement to reflect the information you provide in your cover letter. 6. Please review your reference list to ensure that it is complete and correct. If you have cited papers that have been retracted, please include the rationale for doing so in the manuscript text, or remove these references and replace them with relevant current references. Any changes to the reference list should be mentioned in the rebuttal letter that accompanies your revised manuscript. If you need to cite a retracted article, indicate the article’s retracted status in the References list and also include a citation and full reference for the retraction notice. Additional Editor Comments: The manuscript has been reviewed by two referees. Both have found that the work is meaningful and worth publication. They have provided some comments and suggestions to the authors for the revision. [Note: HTML markup is below. Please do not edit.] Reviewers' comments: Reviewer's Responses to Questions Comments to the Author 1. Is the manuscript technically sound, and do the data support the conclusions? The manuscript must describe a technically sound piece of scientific research with data that supports the conclusions. Experiments must have been conducted rigorously, with appropriate controls, replication, and sample sizes. The conclusions must be drawn appropriately based on the data presented. Reviewer #1: Yes Reviewer #2: Partly ******** 2. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously? Reviewer #1: Yes Reviewer #2: I Don't Know ****** 3. Have the authors made all data underlying the findings in their manuscript fully available? The PLOS Data policy requires authors to make all data underlying the findings described in their manuscript fully available without restriction, with rare exception (please refer to the Data Availability Statement in the manuscript PDF file). The data should be provided as part of the manuscript or its supporting information, or deposited to a public repository. For example, in addition to summary statistics, the data points behind means, medians and variance measures should be available. If there are restrictions on publicly sharing data—e.g. participant privacy or use of data from a third party—those must be specified. Reviewer #1: Yes Reviewer #2: Yes ****** 4. Is the manuscript presented in an intelligible fashion and written in standard English? PLOS ONE does not copyedit accepted manuscripts, so the language in submitted articles must be clear, correct, and unambiguous. Any typographical or grammatical errors should be corrected at revision, so please note any specific errors here. Reviewer #1: Yes Reviewer #2: Yes ****** 5. Review Comments to the Author Please use the space provided to explain your answers to the questions above. You may also include additional comments for the author, including concerns about dual publication, research ethics, or publication ethics. (Please upload your review as an attachment if it exceeds 20,000 characters) Reviewer #1: This is a meaningful review paper. The structure is well-organized. Some parts need to be improved: Minor points: 1. In the "4. Method", the sub-titles seem to have typos. The titles should be "4. X", rather than "1. X". 2. The "6. Discussion" contains much information. Please make it more concise and use some sub-titles or sub-sections to construct this section in a more logical manner. Major points: 1. The authors listed some previous HIS papers' practical effects without these HISs' underpinning technologies. These HISs' technical supports should also be considered in this review. Such that, which company / what database technologies provide this specific HIS service. What does the UI present / How does this HIS work in the investigated papers. 2. Adding more figures and tables will make this review more logical and clearer. For example, the "5. Results" section presented the reviews with various sub-sections. Each sub-section can have a corresponding table, which has columns like, "paper title", "year", "HIS type", "impact", etc. 3. This review paper is a "systematic review across several decades of research". Therefore, it could be better if the systematic logic of this review paper can be highlighted. Why this review is systematic? What sub-systems or specific sub-domains does this review study. What are the changes in HISs during these decades? What are the HISs' differences among different countries? 4. The authors also mentioned the influences of the COVID-19 pandemic. Did COVID-19 affect the selected HIS papers in this review? Are these HISs before COVID-19, or after COVID-19? 5. Please present the review through more figures, tables, and various pictures, rather than pure text. The figures can make this review more straightforward, and deliver more information. Reviewer #2: Appreciating your work, kindly find hereunder some comments. 1. Can the authors please review the PLOS guidelines for manuscript submission and revise the contents of the manuscript accordingly. Particularly in question are the "objective, research question" segments. Additionally, the lack of line numbers make it difficult to give comments. 2. There is significant overlap in content included in the results and discussion sections. Suggest revision. ****** 6. PLOS authors have the option to publish the peer review history of their article (what does this mean?). If published, this will include your full peer review and any attached files. If you choose “no”, your identity will remain anonymous but your review may still be made public. Do you want your identity to be public for this peer review? For information about this choice, including consent withdrawal, please see our Privacy Policy. Reviewer #1: No Reviewer #2: No ******** [NOTE: If reviewer comments were submitted as an attachment file, they will be attached to this email and accessible via the submission site. Please log into your account, locate the manuscript record, and check for the action link "View Attachments". If this link does not appear, there are no attachment files.] While revising your submission, please upload your figure files to the Preflight Analysis and Conversion Engine (PACE) digital diagnostic tool, https://pacev2.apexcovantage.com/. PACE helps ensure that figures meet PLOS requirements. To use PACE, you must first register as a user. Registration is free. Then, login and navigate to the UPLOAD tab, where you will find detailed instructions on how to use the tool. If you encounter any issues or have any questions when using PACE, please email PLOS at figures@plos.org. Please note that Supporting Information files do not need this step. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0274493.r001
Revision 1
30 Jul 2022 Author Response II. Reviewer 1’s comments 2.1 In the "4. Method", the sub-titles seem to have typos. The titles should be "4. X", rather than "1. X". • We corrected the sub-sections to 4.1, 4.2, etc. as suggested by the reviewer. 2.2 The "6. Discussion" contains much information. Please make it more concise and use some sub-titles or sub-sections to construct this section in a more logical manner. • We added the following sub-titles to reflect the content in “6. Discussion” to divide it into logical themes. 6.1 Summary of the key findings 6.2 Strength and limitations 6.3 Implications for patient flow management practice 6.4 Implications for future research • We removed some of the text deemed redundant or repetitive in this section. 2.3 The authors listed some previous HIS papers' practical effects without these HISs' underpinning technologies. These HISs' technical supports should also be considered in this review. Such that, which company / what database technologies provide this specific HIS service. What does the UI present / How does this HIS work in the investigated papers. • We highly appreciate this feedback and believe that this recommendation is very relevant to make our review more interesting and valuable. In response to this, we added a supporting table in S3_File that lists all of the information system interventions of the included studies. We also re-visited all of the included studies in our review and tried to extract the technical aspects of the included information system interventions. Unfortunately, many of the included studies in our review did not contain technical details of the interventions. The few studies that contain some technical descriptions make it infeasible to tabulate the database technologies, UI presentation, HISs’ underpinning technologies or how the HIS work in a meaningful way. We completely agree that this lack of technical descriptions limits our understanding of the impacts of these HIS interventions on patient flow management, and this is a limitation of the included studies. We acknowledged this limitation in Section 6 and recommended future research to overcome this limitation. 2.4 Adding more figures and tables will make this review more logical and clearer. For example, the "5. Results" section presented the reviews with various sub-sections. Each sub-section can have a corresponding table, which has columns like, "paper title", "year", "HIS type", "impact", etc. • We added a new table (Table 5) to the Section 5 to provide an overview of our result section. • We also believe that our Fig.2 is an interesting visualisation of the impact of HIS on different areas of the whole care continuum. 2.5 This review paper is a "systematic review across several decades of research". Therefore, it could be better if the systematic logic of this review paper can be highlighted. Why this review is systematic? What sub-systems or specific sub-domains does this review study. What are the changes in HISs during these decades? What are the HISs' differences among different countries? • We added a text under Table 4 to describe changes in the application of HIS in patient flow management practice over time and the differences between countries. We believe the addition of this text together with Table 4 will provide the audience with more complete information. • In regard to the question “Why this review is systematic?”, we believe this question is related to our method of conducting this systematic review. If this is the case, we provided a detailed description of our method in Section 4. In this section, we specified how we searched for publications including a systematic search strategy, how we selected relevant studies, extracted and analysed the information including an analytical framework which was used for our review. 2.6 The authors also mentioned the influences of the COVID-19 pandemic. Did COVID-19 affect the selected HIS papers in this review? Are these HISs before COVID-19, or after COVID-19? • We reviewed our discussion on this point and can confirm that: o The HIS interventions in the included studies were before COVID_19. o The reason why we mentioned the pandemic is because it may be an additional complicating factor that may be needed to be considered in future research. 2.7 Please present the review through more figures, tables, and various pictures, rather than pure text. The figures can make this review more straightforward, and deliver more information. • We believe this comment and comment 2.4 are similar and so we added a new table to Section 5. III. Reviewer 2’s comments 3.1 Can the authors please review the PLOS guidelines for manuscript submission and revise the contents of the manuscript accordingly. Particularly in question are the "objective, research question" segments. Additionally, the lack of line numbers makes it difficult to give comments. • We have added line numbers to the current version of the manuscript. • We have re-visited PLOS One’s guidelines for formatting and revised our manuscript accordingly. • We added introductory text to Section 3 to relate our research questions to the whole review. 3.2 There is significant overlap in content included in the results and discussion sections. Suggest revision. • We found that there were major repetitions in the text in Section 5 and Section 6 of our review. Therefore, we removed these major sections as follows: o Section 6.1: We removed the discussion on the type of HIS interventions because the information was described in Section 5. o Section 6.1: We removed the discussion on the patient flow measures and the Donabedian model because it repeated Section 5.2 Attachments Attachment Submitted filename: Response to Reviewers.docx https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0274493.r002
30 Aug 2022 Decision Letter - Yong-Hong Kuo, Editor Understanding the impacts of health information systems on patient flow management: A systematic review across several decades of research PONE-D-22-14339R1 Dear Dr. Nguyen, We’re pleased to inform you that your manuscript has been judged scientifically suitable for publication and will be formally accepted for publication once it meets all outstanding technical requirements. Within one week, you’ll receive an e-mail detailing the required amendments. When these have been addressed, you’ll receive a formal acceptance letter and your manuscript will be scheduled for publication. An invoice for payment will follow shortly after the formal acceptance. To ensure an efficient process, please log into Editorial Manager at http://www.editorialmanager.com/pone/, click the 'Update My Information' link at the top of the page, and double check that your user information is up-to-date. If you have any billing related questions, please contact our Author Billing department directly at authorbilling@plos.org. If your institution or institutions have a press office, please notify them about your upcoming paper to help maximize its impact. If they’ll be preparing press materials, please inform our press team as soon as possible -- no later than 48 hours after receiving the formal acceptance. Your manuscript will remain under strict press embargo until 2 pm Eastern Time on the date of publication. For more information, please contact onepress@plos.org. Kind regards, Yong-Hong Kuo Academic Editor PLOS ONE Additional Editor Comments (optional): Based on the referees' recommendations, I recommend Accept. Reviewers' comments: Reviewer's Responses to Questions Comments to the Author 1. If the authors have adequately addressed your comments raised in a previous round of review and you feel that this manuscript is now acceptable for publication, you may indicate that here to bypass the “Comments to the Author” section, enter your conflict of interest statement in the “Confidential to Editor” section, and submit your "Accept" recommendation. Reviewer #1: All comments have been addressed Reviewer #2: All comments have been addressed ******** 2. Is the manuscript technically sound, and do the data support the conclusions? The manuscript must describe a technically sound piece of scientific research with data that supports the conclusions. Experiments must have been conducted rigorously, with appropriate controls, replication, and sample sizes. The conclusions must be drawn appropriately based on the data presented. Reviewer #1: (No Response) Reviewer #2: Yes ****** 3. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously? Reviewer #1: (No Response) Reviewer #2: Yes ****** 4. Have the authors made all data underlying the findings in their manuscript fully available? The PLOS Data policy requires authors to make all data underlying the findings described in their manuscript fully available without restriction, with rare exception (please refer to the Data Availability Statement in the manuscript PDF file). The data should be provided as part of the manuscript or its supporting information, or deposited to a public repository. For example, in addition to summary statistics, the data points behind means, medians and variance measures should be available. If there are restrictions on publicly sharing data—e.g. participant privacy or use of data from a third party—those must be specified. Reviewer #1: (No Response) Reviewer #2: Yes ****** 5. Is the manuscript presented in an intelligible fashion and written in standard English? PLOS ONE does not copyedit accepted manuscripts, so the language in submitted articles must be clear, correct, and unambiguous. Any typographical or grammatical errors should be corrected at revision, so please note any specific errors here. Reviewer #1: (No Response) Reviewer #2: Yes ****** 6. Review Comments to the Author Please use the space provided to explain your answers to the questions above. You may also include additional comments for the author, including concerns about dual publication, research ethics, or publication ethics. (Please upload your review as an attachment if it exceeds 20,000 characters) Reviewer #1: (No Response) Reviewer #2: I would like to thank the authors for taking the time and employing a much needed effort in bettering the contents of their manuscript as per the suggested revisions. ****** 7. PLOS authors have the option to publish the peer review history of their article (what does this mean?). If published, this will include your full peer review and any attached files. If you choose “no”, your identity will remain anonymous but your review may still be made public. Do you want your identity to be public for this peer review? For information about this choice, including consent withdrawal, please see our Privacy Policy. Reviewer #1: No Reviewer #2: No ******** https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0274493.r003
Formally Accepted
2 Sep 2022 Acceptance Letter - Yong-Hong Kuo, Editor PONE-D-22-14339R1 Understanding the impacts of health information systems on patient flow management: A systematic review across several decades of research Dear Dr. Nguyen: I'm pleased to inform you that your manuscript has been deemed suitable for publication in PLOS ONE. Congratulations! Your manuscript is now with our production department. If your institution or institutions have a press office, please let them know about your upcoming paper now to help maximize its impact. If they'll be preparing press materials, please inform our press team within the next 48 hours. Your manuscript will remain under strict press embargo until 2 pm Eastern Time on the date of publication. For more information please contact onepress@plos.org. If we can help with anything else, please email us at plosone@plos.org. Thank you for submitting your work to PLOS ONE and supporting open access. Kind regards, PLOS ONE Editorial Office Staff on behalf of Dr. Yong-Hong Kuo Academic Editor PLOS ONE https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0274493.r004

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