PHD, Kent State University, 2012, College of Business and Entrepreneurship, Ambassador Crawford / Department of Management and Information Systems

Timely identification and reporting of rare infectious diseases has important economic, social and health implications. In this study, we investigate how different stakeholders in the existing reporting system influence the timeliness in identification and reporting of rare infectious diseases. Building on the vision of the information supply chain (Marinos, 2005; Sun & Yen, 2005) and drawing upon co-ordination theory to investigate inter-organizational dependencies, this dissertation treats information processing and transfer as an information supply chain system whose key performance indicator is timeliness. Jajosky and Groseclose (2004) identified that information reporting lead time is related to the number of layers of reporting. In this dissertation, we look at three layers of reporting rare infectious diseases in the Ohio Disease Reporting System (ODRS), and identify factors that influence the delay in processing and reporting of these diseases. The three layers considered are those for which the county public health system is responsible for the preventive and control measures of any event of rare infectious diseases and is also responsible for entering the confirmatory information into the state reporting system i.e. ODRS. This dissertation investigates the rare infectious disease reporting system in a way different from traditional approaches. Our view of a reporting system is an information supply chain, just as any product supply chain, with different layers in reporting, in which exist interactions between the members (hospitals, laboratories and public health system). We no longer treat the rare infectious disease information supply chain system as point-to-point, but instead as layer-to-layer relationships and examine in detail the factors influencing the delay in these layers. We use simulation based modeling to represent in a more natural way the individual interactive entities in the information supply chain system and to investigate the lead tim (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Murali Shanker PhD (Committee Co-Chair); Michael Hu PhD (Committee Co-Chair); Eddy Patuwo PhD (Committee Member) Subjects: Business Administration; Epidemiology; Health Care; Health Care Management; Health Sciences; Information Systems; Management; Operations Research; Public Health; Public Health Education