Category Archives: DOME

DOME conference on Medical Records Online in Skövde

We had a great Dome conference in Skövde about our research on medical records online. There were 12 reserachers present during this conference from a large number of universities. The first day there were some presentations of new and upcoming studies of the effects of patients reading their medical records online.

Erebouni Arakelian who has a PhD in medicine joined a Dome meeting for the first time and presented the plan for a study on the patient group that she is working with, and that she has done studies on before. She will do 30 interviews during the coming years, and has already gotten ethical approval for her study.

Bridget Kane who does reserch in HCI and in Computer Supported Collaborative Work also joined the meeting for the first time and she did a presentation of her previous studies and what she has done in her work. She has covered a very interesting, and large area related to eHealth.

It was interesting to hear about the plans for the upcoming studies, and to discuss what areas we should look more into based on previous findings. Here are some of the upcoming  studies:

  • Interview study with cancer patients by Ereboni Arakelian as a follow up to the national survey sent out in the fall of 2016 and the interviews made around 2013.
  • Interview and survey study with health care professionals at the Oncology department about the effects on the work environment. Jonas Moll it in charge of this study and bloggs about this study here if you want to know more. (this study is a part of the Disa project)
  • Interviews with patients in primary care about their use of medical records online (as a part of Maria Hägglund and Isabella Scandurra’s project Pacess)

There were some new members of the consortium present at the conference, and some old members have moved on to other research areas. I am however really glad to see that we have created an open and well functioning community where newcomers are very welcome.

Collaboration with the Department of EMR in Region Uppsala

We have had a very good collaboration with the department of EMR in the Region Uppsala since a few years. We call this collaboration the Dive (Digital work enVIronment and Ehealth) project, and we are a group of 3-4 reserachers who participate.  This collaboration has been in the form of an action research project where researchers from our department worked togehter with people from the EMR department in designing a new IT system for surgical planning. We have also collaborated in doing some evaluations of usability aspects that has been used in the deployment of the system. We will also do follow up evaluations of usability. Now we have moved on to looking into decision support systems, and my collegues do vision seminars and will work on a design.

The department of EMR also collaborate with us around the IT in Society class  that has resulted in a report, a presentation and also visibiliy at Vitalis 2017.

The Disa project is also supported by the department of EMR, and we collaborate around this project too. This project includes around 10 reserachers who will look into the effects of digitaliczation in health care and the project will result in concepts and a eWorkenvironment framework possible to use when implementing IT in health care. The department of EMR has an excellent and very active representative on the advisory board of the project who has helped us a lot in understanding the organisation.

In these kinds of collaborations it is crucial to find a win-win situation, where both the reserachers and the organisations feels that they get energy and effect from the collaboration. In our case the collaboration in the  Dive project has given us much insight in eHealth development and in the complexities of working with IT in health care, which is crucial to be able to work in that area. And I know that the department of EMR are very pleased with the input regarding design that we have given hem. The Disa project has just started, and hopwfully that will result in a win-win too.

We are extremely happy about this colllaboration, and strongly recommend other reserach groups to try the same approach to collaboration!

Pod from MT-Talks on Medical Records Online

Before Christmas Jonas Moll and I were interviewed in a pod cast at  about our research on medical records online. The pod cast was produced by department of media technology at Södertörn högskola.

You can find the pod at the MT web page: http://www.mttalks.se/pod/

There seem to be many very interesting pods at this pod cast, and I will make sure to listen to them all in the near future!

 

Seminar on Digital Work Environment with Examples from Health Care and DOME

Last week Gerolf Nauwerck and I did a presentation about Digital Work Environment at the Swedish Ergonomic Society’s yearly meeting. This blog post will shortly describe this presentation. It was the first time that Gerolf and I presented together, but despite limited time for preparing it went really well much thanks to Gerolf and an enthusiastic audience.

Gerolf started off the presentation by discussing the term Digital Work Environment that is used by for example Digitaliseringskommissionen, Prevent and Vision. For example Digitaliseringskommisionen defines it as:

 “The work environment in the digital economy”.

There is no scientific definition of the word, and in research other terms are used such as work engagement and healthy work.

Twenty years ago there were numerous different professions that worked with different tools, but working life has changed and today most work is done using a computer or an iPad, or other ICT technology, see image below:

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When looking at the digital work environment there are numerous alarm reports from health care such as Isabella Scandurras “Disturbing or Facilitating“. Most health care professionals use around 25 different computer systems in their work, and these are often not connected or made to work well together even though they spend much of their time working through these systems. Physicians spend around 50% of their time working with the computer, and around 50% doing other things such as meeting patients. There are numerous media articles about the problems with ICT in health care, see the picture of the blog post. The problems are alarming, and health care professionals are as a consequence not always positive to changes related to IT.

One example of digitalisation in health care is medical records online for patients. Most physicians and nurses are very worried of the effects of this system. Mostly they are worried about the effects on the patient, but they are also worried about the effects on their work environment through the following changes:

  • Changes in well established work routines
  • Time pressure
  • Less time for preparation
  • Increased risk of misjudgements

Health care is not the only area where the digital work environment is problematic. Unionen (one of the largest Swedish unions) distribute a yearly or biannual survey to their members to investigate the digital work environment. The sub-titles of their reports called “The digital work environment of white-collar workers” tell us about the results from the survey:

2008: Why doesn’t it get better?

2010: A system error?

2011: Always online – never relaxed

2012: One step forward and two steps back

2014: No lightning ahead

In the seminar we continued with discussing what is known about software development and success factors, and we presented the results from the CHAOS report and research reports that show that one of the most important things when developing good IT for work is user involvement. But I guess that you already knew that 🙂

 

Patient Empowerment Meets Concerns for Patients – a Study of Patient Accessible Electronic Health Records in Sweden

The DOME consortium presented a paper at the conference Medical Informatics Europe (MIE 2016), in conjunction with Health – Exploring Complexity: An Interdisciplinary Systems Approach (HEC 2016), At Munich, Germany this summer.

Both the slides and the short abstract for the presentation is found on Research Gate. 

The paper contrasts the perspectives of physicians and nurses when it comes to putting medical records online for patients to read and discusses how patient empowerment (which is one of the goals of putting medical records online) meets concerns for patients.

The presentation at the conference was made by the very professional Christiane Grünloh and  Hanife Rexhepi, and the paper was written by then and other DOME researchers: Rose-Mhaire Åhlfeldt, Gunilla Myreteg,  Isto Huvila and me.

The paper addresses the  difference in perspective between physicians and patients that we have seen in our studies.

It is a paper well worth reading, and the presentation has excellent slides presenting the difference. Read it! 

 

Digitalisation and the Effect on the Work Environment of Nurses – Our New Research Project

We have started a new research project, DISA, in the area of digitalisation and the effects on the work environment of nurses. The project will investigate the area from a socio-technical and gender perspective, and the project team is multidisciplinary. I will be leading the work together with Minna Salminen Karlsson from the centre for gender studies at Uppsala University. The project is done in collaboration with the county council in Uppsala, and especially the EPJ division, and we have a very ambitious plan for the work. This will be great fun!

In the project we will do studies of the digital work environment of nurses in surgical care, children’s care and in oncology. The project is off to a good start and we have already come far in the work in oncology and surgical care. The work with the children’s care will have a kick off next week when we are meeting the hospital IT manager to discuss the project.

The DISA project is funded by Forte and part of the project will be a part of the DOME consortium.

What is DOME? Some Words about the Background and the Consortium from My Perspective.

I have collaborated with the county council in Uppsala since 2003 as a part of the project course IT in Society. In this course I collaborate with my husband Mats Daniels who does research on learning environments for developing professional competencies related to IT systems development. The course is based on the teaching strategy of Open Ended Group Projects. Through this course we worked on the topic “Medical Records Online for Patients” a couple of three times between 2003 and 2011. The students did thorough research as a part of their course, and they also wrote one of the white papers that the county council sent to Brussels to get funding for the SUSTAINS project.

Around 2012/ 2012 the large EU project named SUSTAINS started and was coordinated by the county council in Uppsala. Mats Daniels and I were contacted by the project managers Benny Eklund and Leif Lyttkens (with whom we collaborated in the IT in Society course) who asked if we wanted to start a research project and do research on the implementation and consequences of putting medical records online in Uppsala county.

The SUSTAINS project had a meeting in Uppsala around new years eve in 2011/2012 and my husband and I set up a brief document describing the major ideas behind a research project and you still find these ideas in DOME today. These idead were presented at the meeting to see if there were other researchers interested:

  • Three work packages:
    • 1) patients & relatives
    • 2) health care professionals
    • 3) systems development and implementation
  • Multidisciplinary research
  • Studies on the effects of the implementation from different perspectives using both qualitative and quantitative research methods.

My main research areas are IT and work, and how we develop and implement IT for work. However, in DOME I have not only done this but also research looking at the implementation from the patient perspective.

After this initial meeting we organised a few start up meetings in Uppsala for researchers that would be interested in this work. We got help from the EU coordinators at the university to find people, and somehow the words spread and we became a group of around ten people very quickly. I had never met most of these researchers, but we had very open and creative discussions.

During the first years the DOME project had funding from VINNOVA, and the last few years it has changed into a research consortium that consists of  researchers with funding from different sources. This fall we have funding from AFA through the EPSA project, Forte through the DISA project as well as strategic research funding through Örebro University and Uppsala University. This spring there will also be some funding from NordForsk through a new centre for gender research, and from Forte through the PACESS project.

The number of active researchers in DOME has varied over the years, but we are around 12-15 people that participate in meetings and do studies on medical records online. We come from six different universities, and we meet using Skype every three weeks and have a conference every semester at one of the universities. The next DOME conference is organised in Skövde in March 2017. DOME has a small group of leaders, and I am the coordinator of the consortium.

DOME is an open consortium and the only criteria for joining us is that you want to do research in the area of medical records online for patients, and that you spend time with us in DOME.  You can come from any area of research, and any university. 🙂

Experiences from an Expert Workshop in the Area of Medical Records Online for Patients

Last week I organised an expert workshop in the area of medical records online for patients. The workshop was organised in conjunction with the EHiN and International Conference of Telemedicine. Around thirty people attended the workshop, mostly from the different regions in Norway. The workshop information was distributed by us and by INERA who coordinate the introduction of medical records online in Sweden.

The photo for the blog post is from Jonas Moll’s Twitter stream and is a photo of the very cool and well organised conference.

Jonas Moll and me from Uppsala University organised the workshop with Norwegian colleagues: Tove Sørensen and Monika A Johansen from the Norwegian Centre for E-health Research, and also with the excellent Isabella Scandurra, who is a Health Informatics Researcher from Örebro University

The workshop started with a description of the service “Patients’ digital access to their health record”: How much information, which type of journal documents, to how many people, for how long time? with a comparison between the different implementations that exist in Sweden and in Norway. One difference is for example that the primary care notes are not shared online in Norway, and another difference is that Norway do share psychiatry medical records online which we don’t do in Sweden.
We continued with a role play to start up the discussion about who should have access. Jonas Moll did the role play together with Isabella Scandurra and me, and the aim was to present the problematic situation that exists for patients since the information that is shown varies very much between counties. Jonas presented his view as a patient and asked about what could be seen online. I pretended to be Uppsala County Council and tried to make Jonas move to our county. During the role play my best argument to him as a patient was the possibility to see the test results online in our county, and to have graphs made that represent the fluctuation of the test results over time.
We then discussed what type of journal documents should be provided. There has been long discussions in Sweden regarding the children’s medical records, and in Norway they have also had discussions about the appropriateness of showing the medical records online for people with cognitive disabilities.

Most probably we will arrange a similar workshop at Vitalis together with INERA to facilitate the discussion around what should be shown and to whom. See you there!

Please do not confuse your google search with my medical degree – workshop paper at NordiCHI 2016

Last week DOME presented a workshop paper called: “Please do not confuse your google search with my medical degree” at NordiCHI 2016. The paper presents a critical incident regarding relatives reading medical records online where a relative reads the medical record online and googled, and received, a cancer diagnosis.

The workshop included a poster presentation, and the fantastic poster by Hanife Rexhepi and Christiane Grünloh is the image of the blog post. During the workshop we worked very actively with writing post-it notes about the different posters, and it was many interesting learning opportunities found. I really enjoyed the workshop, and I was really impressed by the organisational skills of Christiane Grunloh who was keeping everything togehter in a very nice way.

The paper’s abstract is as follows: 

The availability of medical devices, health apps, and online resources of health data has led to concerns regarding how to identify the quality and validity of online health information. Concerns about patients’ health information seeking on the Web mainly come from the healthcare professionals, whereas patients often seem to be satisfied with the information they find online since they use it to improve the knowledge base about their health condition. This position paper aims to outline a critical incident that illustrates the patient perspective of searching online information in relation to the eHealth service Journalen where patients and relatives in Sweden can access their electronic health record online. The critical incident is based on a true story; it describes how Steve received his cancer diagnosis, and how his wife Tina googled to find out more about the diagnosis. This case illustrates how accessing your electronic health record and Google search can support information needs and increase the understanding of health data for patients and relatives, although the opposite is argued by many professionals in healthcare. Finally the critical incident is discussed in relation to the concept of eHealth literacy and patient empowerment.

A full text of the paper is found at Research Gate