Social network research in health care settings: design and data collection

Social network research can help us understand intractable problems central to the challenges of today's health care system: silo-working, bottlenecks, gaps, poor communication, professional isolation, and other social processes with the propensity to compromise patient safety and quality care. In this paper, we discuss practical and ethical challenges to designing and collecting quality network data faced by health services researchers. The paper develops high-utility recommendations to address these challenges. Design decisions are discussed in light of the dynamism and complexity of health care and the need for more longitudinal, mixed-methods network studies.