Category: Conferences and events

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.

Åsa Cajander interviewed about our HTO hosted workshop at Uppsala Health Summit!

The HTO group is presently involved in many different activities and one of the latest additions to the list is a workshop at Uppsala Health Summit, which Åsa Cajander (main organizer), Christiane Grünloh and Jonas Moll are organizing. This workshop was introduced by Åsa in this blog post. The planning has continued since then and now we have a setup which will soon be available in the pre-conference report which will be posted on the summit web page. On this page you can also already find a short description of our workshop, “Using Data for Better Cancer Treatments”.

In February, Åsa was interviewed about our workshop! Among other things, she discusses some challenges regarding the use of data for diagnosis and treatment of cancer and how we will make use of critical incidents as points of departure in the workshop. You can read about the interview here!

The summit will be held at Uppsala Castle, June 14-15, and according to the recently published summit programme our three-hour workshop will be held during the second day. Organizing this workshop will surely be an interesting and rewarding experience for all of us and hopefully we will come up with results that will inspire further research in this important area!

Nomination of Lars Oestreicher to Uppsala University’s Equal Opportunities Award 2018

Lars Oestreicher was recently nominated to the Equal Opportunites 2018 award by the departments’ equal opportunities group. Congratulations! 

The nomination text : 

Lars Oestreicher works as a teacher and researcher in the field of Accessibility and Design for everyone in Human Computer Interaction. The Design for All area resides on a very clear equal opportunities basis, and contains both knowledge of people’s differences, as a value base that strongly emphasizes inclusion and the problem of stigmatization of people with disabilities in society as well as their vulnerability.

Lars Oestreicher has developed a pioneering course for students in the Design for All area, and has also written a new textbook on the subject as there is no suitable course literature to find to teach these questions. In the course of the course, Lars works very consciously to learn an inclusive mindset, where he, among other things, has moments where the students themselves can experience how to live with a disability.

Lars Oestreicher has also participated as a specialist in accessibility issues in a reference group for the development of the MegaMind exhibition at the Stockholm Technical Museum, and is conducting a VINNOVA-funded project together with Årsta specialist, which aims to allow children with severe cognitive and physical impairments to create music independently.

Lars Oestreicher is the university’s most competent researcher and teacher in this field, and his work and dedication goes far beyond what is expected of a teacher as he has an inclusive perspective in mind. Through his work, he has included equal opportunities issues as part of our education programs for students in computer science. We believe that this deserves to be noted and therefore wishes to nominate Lars to the University’s Equal Opportunities Award.

Workshop on Identifying the Need of Self-reported Data and Self-measurements for Diagnosis and Treatment of Cancer

Jonas Moll, Åsa Cajander, Christiane Grünlog and Isabella Scandurra are organising a workshop at Medical Informatics Europe on “Identifying the Need of Self-reported Data and Self-measurements for Diagnosis and Treatment of Cancer”

Today, numerous data sources are available to healthcare professionals for diagnosing and treating cancer, but there are also data captured by patients, e.g. related to daily progress, which are not readily accessible to healthcare.

In this workshop, we will use the critical incidents technique to inspire participants to elaborate on the need of using new data collections and measurements, for example from continuous self-tracking, as well as utilizing already existing data in new ways for diagnoses and treatment of cancer. Real-life critical incidents related to patients, healthcare professionals, and researchers, will be discussed and used as a basis for scenarios that will illustrate future visions of how self-reported data and self-measurements should be used in combination with existing data sources.

 

Welcome to the workshop!

To register, visit the MIE website. 

 

 

 

Start the Semester with Some Splendid Seminars

On Friday the 19th of January we have the pleasure of starting the day with two open seminars, so if you wish you can join us. From Reykjavik University we have Associate Professor Marta Lárusdóttir and from Copenhagen Business School professor Torkil Clemmensen. Torkil Clemenssen will talk about the socio-Technical Future of HCI and Marta Lárusdóttir will discuss research on the integration of UCD in industry.

The seminars will start at 10.00 in the Faculty Room at Ångström laboratory.

Marta Lárusdóttir
Integrating UCD in Agile Projects in Industry: Research Results and Future Work

Marta will give a talk on the interplay between usability activities and agile software development processes used in the IT industry. Marta has conducted research on this topic for many years collaborating with international researchers and students. Marta will give a summary of the results of these studies and describe future work on this important topic.

Marta Larusdottir is an Associate Professor at Reykjavik University with a PhD in Human-computer interaction. Marta has extensive leading knowledge in the area of evaluation and user feedback in software development. Particularly, she is a well known researcher in agile software development and how the user perspective is integrated in agile processes and has written several papers and arranged workshops on that subject.

This presentation will be followed directly by the presentation by professor Torkil Clemmensen.

Prof. Torkil Clemmensen, Copenhagen Business School
The Socio-Technical Future of HCI

Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) builds on the ideology of empowering the end-users of computers, so that they understand what is happening and can control the outcome (Nielsen, 2005). How does that work for HCI in organizations and societies? While HCI historically has been based on applying cognitive psychology to understand the individual user (Card, Moran, & Newell, 1983), one strong trend in modern and contemporary HCI is to study applications in business, managerial, organizational, and cultural contexts. To design HCI for organizations, the big thing may be to do some kind of HCI design action research that constructs or modifies one or more HCI artefacts within their existing organizational contexts: sketches, prototypes, templates, running systems – anything that changes the interactions that managers and employees do and experience. Hence, the future topics and theory of HCI may indeed be socio-technical.

Torkil Clemmensen is a professor at the Department of Digitalization, Copenhagen Business School, Denmark. His research interest is in psychology as a science of design with a focus on cultural psychological perspectives on usability, user experience, and digitalization of work. He contributes to Human-Computer Interaction, Design, and Information Systems.

Torkil Clemmensen will also lead the discussion in the afternoon when we have the half time seminar for yours truly.

No Time for Dinosaurs

Sweden is “lagging ahead” when it comes to the digital transformation of public organisations. This was the opening message from Expertgruppen för digitala investeringar at a seminar on Agile Transformation. According to recent statistics Sweden is not a leader in the field, something the Swedish Government wishes to change. While we wait for a new authority for Digitalization a special committee has been formed to support public organisations in the transformation. Much of this is done behind the scenes, but there are also open dissemination of best practices. Today’s event was one such occasion.

Anna Eriksson from Lantmäteriet, The Swedish Mapping, Cadastral and Land Registration Authority (I didn’t know that) talked about how the authority were transforming their IT-organisation to embrace agile practices. This was very much done via leading by example. The change project itself was run in the spirit of agile, early adopters were allowed to experiment and yearly hackatons encouraged mixed teams with both IT-developers and business people.

Martin Johansson, CIO at SEB and member of the committe, shared SEB:s long and ongoing digital transformation. Martin’s take home message can be summarized as agile takes time. Working in a large organization with legacy systems as well an established organizational culture agile does not happen overnight. One factor contributing to this was the fact that SEB.s project portfolio contained so many running waterfall projects. These had to be finished before the agile transformation could start to deliver. The dinosaurs had to go, as he said. There were many interesting points in Martins account but one important one was the need to unite the business side and the IT side of the organization. While SEB certainly transformed their IT structure, the importance of this collaboration was emphasized a number of times in his presentation. Judging from our own research experience that seems to be true for a number of other organisations as well.

Why this urgency for going agile? Well, as Anders Nyström–who moderated the seminar–said, the strategic projects are in general to slow for politics. With an average length of 30+ months it is difficult to see the effects of political initiatives. Perhaps even more importantly, both Anna Eriksson and Martin Johansson represent large, well established organisations, nevertheless the disruptions on the market calls for agile responses. Otherwise they might turn out to be  the dinosaurs.

The only thing I missed was the opportunity to ask a second question. I would have been really interested to learn more about their view on the user.

Halvdagskonferens: Stress, näthat och teknikstrul

Arbetsmiljölagen fyller 40 år i år. Det firas den 28 november med en halvdagskonferens på temat digital arbetsmiljö och “40-åring i behov av ett digitalt uppvaknande”, för att citera inbjudan. Konferensen har tre teman: det flexibla arbetslivet, inflytande, uppföljning och övervakning samt hot och trakasserier. Gerolf Nauwerck från HTO kommer att vara en av presentatörerna.

28 Nov 2017 13:00 – 28 Nov 2017 16:30
DIK, Bondegatan 21, Stockholm
Arrangör: Arenagruppen
Obligatorisk anmälan

Singing Mice doing the Digital Transformation

Romantic mice actually do sing. This was but one message from the conference Gilla jobbet (“Enjoy Work”). The event is a joint venture including a number of central actors on the Swedish labour market, who focus on workers’ health and safety. The conference itself had four major tracks: health promotion, the digital work environment, assessment and retention. If you missed it, it will go on tour in spring 2018. (Edit: some seminars were video recorded and you can watch them here.)

One presentation in the health promotion track–by Frida Fossland and Sara Leijonqvist–related to work life balance. Frida Fossland’s message was that we need to be observant of the more subtle aspects of flexible work. Sure, hyper connectivity 24/7 can be a striking aspect, but flexible work also creates tensions between employer and employee that needs to be taken care of–as traditional modes of management by walking around no longer apply. To support this, Prevent (a Swedish health promoting agency) has developed Balansguiden (“The Work Life Balance Guide”). This is an online tool supporting both the employer and the employee with the ultimate goal of facilitating discussions in the workplace relating to policies and strategies for flexible work. It is quite an impressive product and it actually was awarded first prize at the International Media Festival for Prevention in 2017.

One of the main sessions was a joint presentation on the topic of digitalization and the work environment. Sweden’s digitalization champion Jan Gulliksen introduced the topic with an emphasis on the societal aspects of the digital transformation, though with many examples from everyday work. He also promoted a book on the subject that will be released just before Christmas, a book where our colleague Bengt  Sandblad is one of the co-authors.

This was followed by a presentation by Jonas Söderström, Sweden’s usability guru. He is the author of the book Jävla Skitsystem (Stupid **** system!) and is a key figure in establishing public awareness around the topic. He did a great presentation and the figures really brought home the message. Finally, Anna Pramborg from Sunt Arbetsliv ended the session with a preview of a new framework–aimed at municipalities and counties–also related to improving the digital work environment.

The main event at this session was nevertheless the presentation by Fredrik Beskow of the new online tool Inför rätt IT (“Do IT right”) from Prevent, aimed at supporting organisations during digital transformation. This tool in many ways represents Swedish state of the art in this respect, as the team behind it included among others aforementioned Jonas Söderström as well as our own Bengt Sandblad. Fredrik Beskow did stress that this was the first version and that the team were hoping to get lots of  feedback so that the tool could be developed furher.

The day ended with a brilliant piece of entertainment. Stand up comedian Måns Möller and stress researcher Dan Hansson (an Uppsala University alumni) successfully combined humor and science in their show Öka livet! (“More life!”). And yes, it was in this show that the singing mice were introduced. It turns out that mice actually court by singing and we got the opportunity to listen to a smal serenade.

All in all not a bad day at work