Category: Conferences and events

A social event in celebration of our new financial system

At Uppsala University, the administrative system Raindance has been updated to a new version. The HTO-group is doing collaborative work in relation to this project (the EASY project). Last Thursday afternoon, the project celebrated that the implementation phase in now complete, by inviting the users to a network meeting. Approximately 100 users came to the meeting. From the HTO-group, Gunilla and Thomas went.

The afternoon started with information regarding the process as a whole: from the procurement phase until today. Edrun Eriksson (Head of the Ledger Office unit at the Financial Administration and Procurement Division) reminded the users of what expectations and hopes they had forwarded themselves, early on in the process. She gave us some illustrative examples. Furthermore, she had made a printout of the complete list, which was put up on the wall, so that all participants could read them later on during the afternoon. She also presented a summary of all sub groups and sub projects that have been active in the process. They were quite many! For meetings, she had just marked the amount with a question mark – being a bit over conscious regarding the great number of hours put into the project!

Edrun also took the opportunity to express a big “Thank you!” to all the people that have contributed with energy, experience, and time! It is nice for everyone to be reminded about the great effort that has been put into the project, and to hear of everything that is already achieved. Furthermore, the audience was asked a couple of questions with the aid of Menti.com and participants’ cell phones. The first question was “In what area are you presently in biggest need of support?” By choosing from given alternatives, the answers showed up in a pie chart. The other question was regarding ideas for future improvements, which was a free text question; so that the participants could write whatever answers they wanted.

The presentation then continued with a section where we (Gunilla and Thomas) got the chance to present ourselves to the audience. We, of course, have not met so many of all the users previously. We talked in general about IT artifacts, and of how people in an organization often experience them at times of changes. IT artifacts holds not only the technological dimension, but also a social dimension. It is OK to feel lost sometimes, and one needs to hear someone tell you this. 🙂 We ended our section by talking more specifically about the survey we are preparing to distribute to the users. The purpose of the survey is to evaluate some issues that can – hopefully! – be described as successes, and to point out some specific areas where users would like to see further improvements.

After us, we all got some information regarding the closing of the year 2018, presented by Hanna Mörtberg (newly appointed University Director of Finance at the University Management and Management Council). She showed us some comparative numbers from the years 2010 until today. The university is growing at an amazing speed and has now reached over a 7 billion turnaround!

Spirits were quite high when the presentations were over and we started on some nice snacks with a glass of bubbling refreshments. Anyone had the opportunity to write down whatever ideas they wanted to share about the project, on a writing wall that was positioned at the back of the room. Still, I believe people mostly wanted to chat with friends, have some good food, and just relax after a great job done! Overall, the afternoon was a well-spent time to mark the end of the implementation phase. Now, the system will continue to change over time, as any IT system would. It is a never-ending story.

Lecture on Digitalization and our Work Environment

 

System development work is difficult, and many IT systems do not work satisfactorily despite intensive technology development. My research is about improving the situation and understanding what the problems are. I am working on developing improved working methods in the organizations and projects that develop and introduce IT. The focus here is user-centered methods, gender, sociotechnical perspective and agile development. I have also researched the skills that the people in the projects need to master to be able to work with the development of complex systems that support people in a good way.

If you are curious about my research – listen to the 12 min long lecture in Swedish

 

NordiCHI’18 – Key Note by Carly Gloge on Moonshot thinking at Google X and Pippi Longstocking Reflections

This week several members of the HTO group attended the NordiCHI 2018 conference in Olso, with the theme “revisiting the life cycle”. Here are some highlights from the first key note that we attended. In this key note Carly Gloge presented some work at company X which is Google’s “moonshot factory”. Their idea is to start with the really big problems first, and trying to solve them with innovation and technology. Some examples of innovations are self driving cars, here presented as reinventing the car driver.

This key note was really also addressing diversity as a success factor for the Moonshot factory, as well as being brave. Google X has really focused on diversity, and Carly Gloge says that this is one of the reasons why Google X has been so successful. A veryinteresting thing that came up related to this in the discussions section was the fact that Google is sued by Caucasian men that feel that they don’t have equal opportunities as other people at Google. They have ended up being accused of discrimination towards Caucasian men!

“If I would have known then what I know now, I would really have focused on diversity on my team in my previous jobs”.

Carly Gloge also presented their finding that psychological safety is at the core of successful teams. This finding is based on a Google investigation on successful teams where they ended up understanding that psychological safety was the only way to create a successful team, and not combining Type A personalities or “alpha males”.

They also very much focus on the growth mindset as a way of thinking, which means that you can always learn new things and that it is not innate to be an expert in something. This mindset is also mentioned as the “YET” mindset – I don’t know this yet and some in our HTO group has done some research on this mindset in computer science. This made us think of one of the famous quotes from Pippi Longstocking:

“I have never tried that before, so I think I should definitely be able to do that.”

― Astrid Lindgren, Pippi Longstocking

Carly Gloge tells us that the importance of diversity is also gaining traction in the asset management community, with large actors such as the US company Blackrock identifying diversity as a success factor that they include when creating their investment strategies.

Google has acquired a lot of companies, small and large, and Carly Gloge’s team is one composed of several such acquisitions. As with any acquisition this has its challenges, especially for a company aiming for radical solutions to the world’s problems. As Carly puts it, they frequently need to ask themselves “are we [our group/team] just a solution looking for a problem, or what are the problems we really would like to tackle?”

A suitable quote from Carly to start off this conference:
“If you obsess over your users, you can’t go wrong”

Inauguration of Åsa Cajander as New Full Professor

Åsa Cajander will be installed as one of around 20 new full professors at Uppsala University on the 16th of November 2018 between 15-17. There will be plenty of other people from the department at the same inauguration as we seem to be very successful this year in promoting full professors.

The inauguration ceremony has its roots in the medieval university, and is really one of the university’s grand ceremonies. During the week before the inauguration all the new professors will do lectures presenting their work. These lectures are recorded and can be found online for the curious reader.

Doktorspromotionen jan 2018 Foto. Mikael Wallerstedt

Uppsala University also has a very grand Conferment Cermony. The Conferment Ceremony and the Inauguration of Professors are the ceremonies which exist att all Swedish universities and research university colleges. While the Conferment Ceremony is connected to the individual faculties, each with its own promotor, the Inauguration is common to the whole university.

 

Workshop at Uppsala Health Summit 2018: Using Data for Better Cancer Treatments

The international Uppsala Health Summit is an annual meeting for dialogue on challenges for health and healthcare. The summit is a collaborative effort between eleven Swedish public and not-for-profit partners, led by Uppsala University. Each year, the summit focuses on one challenge for health and healthcare and the question on how to overcome obstacles from implementing knowledge from research and innovations. Around 200 personally invited experts from all over the world and from different sectors come together to engage in dialogues in plenum sessions and in solution-oriented workshops. Last year, delegates came from 39 different countries.

Summit 2018: Care for Cancer

This year’s summit takes place form 14-15 June 2018 is themed Care for Cancer. Patients today have more opportunities than ever to survive and even to recover from cancer. However, the world is facing growing incidence and prevalence of cancer and preventive actions (e.g., adopting a healthy life-style) can only solve some parts of the problem. The provision of financial resources as well as equal access to treatments is challenging for healthcare systems around the world, despite growing treatment opportunities.

Uppsala Health Summit 2018 focuses on how we can open up these opportunities for a growing number of patients, by making better use of data and technologies and on how such use can pave way for a more equitable access to the best possible treatment and diagnostics within any given context.

The programme is available here and addresses a broad range of topics in workshops and plenum sessions. Some of these are: precision medicine in cancer care, patients as a driving force to develop care, long term care for cancer survivors, access to treatments and diagnosis, implementing physical exercise in cancer care, and many more.

Our Workshop: Using Data for Better Cancer Treatments

HTO group members Åsa Cajander, Christiane Grünloh, and Jonas Moll are also organising a workshop on Using Data for Better Cancer Treatments.  In our workshop, we will make use of the Critical Incidents workshop format we have used before at other venues (e.g., at NordiCHI 2016, which is described in more detail in this paper, and at Medical Informatics Europe 2018, which Jonas wrote about on his blog).

A critical incident is an event that has happened to a person and that this person regards as important or significant in some way. Such an incident can be very useful to learn from, and thus it can be an event that is perceived as positive or as negative. Critical incidents have been used a lot for critical reflection in areas such as aviation (e.g., to analyse failures or human errors), health, education and social work.

For our workshop we reached out to experts and asked for incidents we could use in our workshop to inspire discussion in the group work. Kelechi Eguzo, Marije Wolvers, and Isabella Scandurra will present their critical incidents, which have been illustrated by Maja Larsson.

As the aim of our workshop is to develop Visions of the Future, we are very happy that Prof. Bengt Sandblad will give a keynote on Future Workshops, which is a well established method that has been used in various domains (e.g., healthcare, traffic control, administrative work). Making use of the instructions for a future workshop, we will then develop visions of the future from different perspectives: researcher, physician, nurse, or patient.

Together with more than 60 delegates who signed up for our workshop, we will sketch A Day In a Life in 2050. As workshops at the Uppsala Health Summit are solution-oriented, we are including answers to questions such as:

  • Who must be involved?
  • Who can take the first step?
  • How will this contribute to more efficient cancer care?
  • How will this contribute to more equal cancer care?
  • Improve to the individual patient’s quality of life
  • How can this influence which health decisions the patient and her kin can make?

We are really looking forward to the Health Summit and will also attend other workshops and plenary sessions. You can read the pre-conference report where all workshops are outlined here.

Article in Interactions Highlighing the SIGCHI/EIT Health Summer School

Last summer many from the HTO group joined the SIGCHI/EIT Health Summer School that was organised in Dublin and in Uppsala/Stockholm. The photo in the blog post is from the amazing library at Trinity Colleague.

The magazine Interactions highlighted the summer school in their latest edition.

The article highlights some of the learning experiences from organising such a summer school, such as that demand is high for such summer courses, patient participation is very valuable and that it was easy to recruit contributors to the summer school.

I know that the other organisers of the summer school thought that it was a lot of administration, but all agreed that it was also great fun!

Interactions also highlighted some of the HTO groups’ blog posts about the summer school found here:

Jonas Moll: https://molljonas.wordpress.com/2017/07/01/ehealth-summer-school-in-dublin-day-5/

Christiane Grünloh: https://www.htogroup.org/2017/07/08/behaviour-change-social-practice-theory-and-learned-helplessness/

Diane Golay: http://dianegolay.ch/2017/07/05/on-humans-computers-and-why-users-should-not-be-blamed-for-struggling-with-computerized-systems/

 

Digitaliseringen och arbetsmiljön – en nyutgiven bok av Bengt Sandblad mfl.

Boken som Bengt Sandblad från HTO-gruppen har varit med och skrivit finns nu att köpa! Du kan besälla boken tex här. 

 

Vad är en god digital arbetsmiljö? Hur går man till väga för att skapa en sådan? Trots att det i dag finns mycket kunskap om detta, ser vi fortfarande it-projekt som havererar och missnöjda användare. Det är uppenbarligen svårt att lyckas i praktiken. Teorier måste omsättas i praktisk handling.

När användningen och betydelsen av de digitala stödsystemen i arbets­­livet ökar handlar det i allt större utsträckning om en digital arbetsmiljö. Om alla ska kunna utföra sina arbetsuppgifter på ett effektivt och säkert ?sätt, med hög kvalitet och utan onödiga belastningar, måste man ställa höga krav på de digitala systemens utformning och införande. Erfarenheterna i dag är tudelade: dels bidrar it-systemen till förnyelse ?och verksamhetsnytta, dels uppvisar de alltför ofta stora brister vilket medför påtagliga arbetsmiljöproblem. Många användare är frustrerade över att deras it-verktyg inte stödjer dem eller fungerar som de borde.?

Den här boken ger en grundläggande beskrivning av kunskapsläget om digitalisering och digitala arbetsmiljöproblem, samt en omfattande vägledning i hur man kan utnyttja digitaliseringens möjligheter och samtidigt försäkra sig om en god och hållbar digital arbetsmiljö.

Presentation by Åsa Cajander and Jonas Moll at Medical Informatics Europe

During the first day of the Medical Informatics Europe (MIE) Conference Åsa Cajander and I presented the paper that was introduced in this blog post. Actually, this was the first presentation held by representatives from the HTO group during this year’s combined MIE/Vitalis event, but certainly not the last – we were active on stage, or as workshop leaders, during each and every day!

This particular presentation was based on a study that was conducted within the scope of a master’s thesis project at Uppsala University by Sara Englund and Anastasia Hansman. The project focused on the Swedish patient accessible electronic health record system Journalen (and hence was tightly connected to the DOME consortium) and more specifically on how nurses see that Journalen has affected their work environment and their communication with patients.

The result of the semi-structured interviews conducted with the nurses at a primary care center in Region Uppsala, first of all showed similar as our earlier interviews with physicians – Journalen has changed the interaction with patients, created an increased workload and created uncertainty regarding when to inform patients of results now that the patients can read even unsigned notes. Even though most of the results were in line with results from our earlier research in DOME, one new theme arose from the interview analysis – the need for new knowledge. Several nurses indicated that education was needed, focusing on how Journalen should be used both by patients and in the clinician-patient relationship. This is an important result, which should be taken very seriously.

All conference papers are published open access, so you can find all research presented at MIE here. You can find the paper that Åsa and I presented here.

Stay tuned for more posts about the HTO activities at MIE/Vitalis 2018! 🙂

Physicians, Patients and the Patient-Accessible EHR

Christiane presenting her draft of her doctoral thesis on April 17, 2018

Christiane Grünloh, one of the members of our research group, will soon be defending her PhD thesis. Last week, it was time for her to present a draft of her work, which she plans to defend by the end of the year. I jump on the opportunity to write of few lines on her research, which revolves around the Patient-Accessible Electronic Health Record online.

Christiane is one of the researchers of the DOME Consortium, working on the Development of Online Medical records and E-health services. She has been focusing on investigating the perspective of, respectively, physicians and patients on the EHR online – “Journalen” in Swedish. Research about this topic is particularly important since the implementation of Journalen in Sweden has been a very controversial project. Indeed, while patient organizations predominantly were in its favour, caring professionals were, for the most part, against it.

In her research, Christiane was able to look more closely at the reasons behind physicians’ strong opposition to the idea of enabling patients to access their EHR online. She was also able to investigate what was the value of this service from the patients’ point of view. In doing so, she found that physicians and patients had very different perspectives on the topic, and reflected on ways to bridge the gap between those two groups in order to improve the quality of the patient-physician relationship.

You can find Christiane on Twitter (where she is a very active user!) and LinkedIn. If you were attending the Vitalis / MIE 2018 conference in Gothenburg, you maybe also were able to attend her workshop on “Identifying the Need of Self-reported Data and Self-measurements for Diagnosis and Treatment of Cancer”, which she is held together with Jonas Moll, Isabella Scandurra and Åsa Cajander last Thursday.