Page - 159 - in Applied Interdisciplinary Theory in Health Informatics - Knowledge Base for Practitioners

Control Theory to Design and Evaluate Wouter T. GUDE a,1 and Niels PEEK b,c a Department of Medical Informatics, Amsterdam UMC, University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam Public Health research institute, The Netherlands b Division of Informatics, Imaging, and Data Science, School of Health Sciences, The University of Manchester, United Kingdom c NIHR Greater Manchester Patient Safety Translational Research Centre, The University of Manchester, United Kingdom Abstract. Control theory is about the processes underlying the behaviour of self- regulating agents. It proposes that behaviour is regulated by a negative feedback loop, in which the agent compares the perception of its current state against a goal state and will strive to reduce perceived discrepancies by modifying its behaviour. Although studies in health informatics often do not report the use of this theory, the principle of a negative feedback loop underlies many applications in the field. This chapter describes how control theory fits within health informatics, discussing its role in the development and assessment of audit and feedback interventions in healthcare. Control theory has been used to synthesise evidence of audit and feedback, and to design and evaluate interventions to improve the quality of blood transfusion practice, cardiac rehabilitation, and intensive care. This has driven progress in our understanding of the underlying mechanisms of audit and feedback for improving health care, and has helped to design better interventions. Keywords. Quality of Health Care; Continuous Quality Management; Clinical Audit; Feedback; Self-Regulation. Learning objectives After reading this chapter the reader will: 1. Have a broad understanding of Control Theory (CT) and its applications in behavioural sciences. 2. Understand the application of CT in the design and evaluation of health informatics (HI) interventions, such as audit and feedback; decision support; health behaviour change apps; and supervised machine learning. 3. Understand how CT has been used in scientific studies to evaluate and improve the design of audit and feedback interventions. 1 Corresponding Author: Wouter Gude, E-mail: w.t.gude@amc.uva.nl. Audit and Feedback Interventions Applied Interdisciplinary Theory in Health Informatics P. Scott et al. (Eds.) © 2019 The authors and IOS Press. This article is published online with Open Access by IOS Press and distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License 4.0 (CC BY-NC 4.0). doi:10.3233/SHTI190120 159