We’ve got a great collection of allied health professionals, health science professionals, and technical professionals with an interest in digital health here on the eHealth Forum. They are in the group @ahst.
There is a wee problem related to this group. We have many people who, when joining up, choose “Allied Health / Scientific / Techical” when in fact they are not in a clinical profession at all.
Most of these folk are IT professionals, and should choose the third option below:
When we ask people what profession they belong to, they are presented with these options (and must choose just one)
This causes trouble when we try to categorise folk into clinicians vs non-clinicians (especially for CiLN stuff).
Does anyone have any suggestions as to how we should manage this? Here are some of my ideas:
Make Health Information Technologist the first option
currently they are (mostly) alphabetical apart from the last two
people tend to choose the first option that is ‘close enough’
Retitle AHST something like simply “Allied Health & Scientific”
Live with the problem and manually re-categorise folk when the error becomes apparent
we will occasionally make embarrasing mistakes
clashes with my slightly autistic need to keep things tidy and logical
As a temporary measure, I’ve implemented No 1. But are very open to suggestions - especially from @ahst!
If you want to communicate with any group that you are a member of, simply click on them on the left bar and send them a Message. Larger or busier groups will tend to have their own category instead (it should state this in the group description).
Can we put sub-headings of ‘Clinical’ and ‘Non Clinical’ to make it SUPER clear? Although that might pose an issue as although I have a clinical background, I no longer work clinically…
Putting Health Information Technologist first isn’t a bad idea though.
Thanks @NathanK - it’s a perennial problem for those of us who belong to the AHST group.
I have been very pedantic in my professional title to always add Scientific and Technical (traditionally they are left off with the title being Chief Allied Health Professions Officer) - That has lead to issues of the Scientific and Technical Groups feeling unrepresented or not knowing that these roles are here to support them too… so my preference is to not drop the Technical handle…
Outside of your idea to shift Information Technologist to the top I’m not sure there is an easy fix.
Adding ‘not information technologist’ to the end may be and option, but makes it a long title - ie Allied Health, Scientific and Technical Professions (not information technologist - see below)???
You could (as you suggest) have a professional group termed AHST - clinical, and then one for Technical - ICT. The AHST professionals will recognise this as their professional group and identify with the group if they are in clinical practice or in a dual role within ICT and maintain a level of clinical practice.
This is a good and simple way to make things clearer, and achieve @tamzin’s and @MelanieConsedine’s intent nicely.
I confess that I had to look up ICT - Information, Communication, and Technology. Guess that includes me these days . This also makes me pause - the heavy use of abbreviations (specifically initialisms) may in fact confuse, and we don’t use them in the other options Consistency is really important in this whole UX thing.
How about we go with the order switch for now, and if it remains a practical problem we can dive in and overhaul the whole list, peppering it with abbreviations liberally?
. This also makes me pause - the heavy use of abbreviations (specifically