DISA – Health, Technology & Organisation (HTO)

The Effects of Digitalization on the Nurses Work Environment DISA: The Coolest Project @ Uppsala University?

We think that we have a very cool project. We are truly a multidisciplinary team working on digitalization and the effects on the nurses work environment. We also have a very good reference group, and our collaboration with Region Uppsala in the project is fantastic.

When we saw that there was a competition about the coolest project at Uppsala University we nominated ourselves!

They will announce the winners of the competition in a couple of weeks at a faculty pub event. We´ll be there to celebrate with the winners, or perhaps we are the winners?

Paper: Medical Records Online for Patients and Effects on the Work Environment of Nurses

We have one paper from the DISA project accepted for Medical Informatics Europe 2018. The paper is written by Åsa Cajander, Jonas Moll, Sara Englund and Anastasia Hansman and will be presented at the conference in Gothenburg 24-26 of April 2018. The paper is based on Sara Englund and Anastasia Hansmans study with interviews of nurses in primary care.

Below is the abstract of the paper:

In 2012 Patients Accessible Electronic Health Records (PAEHR) was introduced in Region Uppsala, Sweden. When PAEHR was introduced heath care professionals were very concerned especially in relation to potential negative effects on their work environment. However, few studies exist that investigate in what way work environments have been affected, and no studies have focused on the nurses’ working in primary care. Hence, the purpose of this study was to fill this gap through seven interviews with primary care nurses that were transcribed and thematically analysed.

The study shows that the nurses’ experiences an altered contact as patients accessing PAEHR came prepared to meetings with more informed questions. They also experienced that the service had increased their work load and that it creates uncertainty for nurses who do not know when to inform the patient about test results etc. Finally, some implications are discussed in relation to the patients’ role in shared decision making.

Work Domain Analysis of an Intensive Care Unit: a study on how digitalization affects nurses’ work

During the spring Sara Carlson, from the master program in Human-Computer Interaction at Uppsala University, will work on her master thesis about how changes in a work system due to digitalization can be modelled. She will conduct observations and interviews with nurses at an intensive care unit to investigate the effect of the new system that have been implemented. She will explore how these changes can be modelled in an Abstraction Hierarchy from the Cognitive Work Analysis framework, and compare her results to an analysis of the same intensive care unit made prior the system implementation.

We are looking forward to work with Sara and her interesting study, more updates will come!

HTO Researchers Interviewed

Bengt Sandbad, Gerolf Nauwerk and Åsa Cajander were interviewed for a special issue on digital work environment, and our research is presented in two different articles in the magazine “Användbart!”.

The first article is about cognitive work environment work, and the history of the research area. It has the following introduction:

When you need your computer the most of them fail you. A sudden update interrupts your job. A crash erases the whole the morning’s work. Perhaps you can you recognize the stress when you made a mistake like that cannot be undone? Researcher Bengt Sandblad mean the way most IT systems are built is in conflict with how we humans work. Then cognitive work environment problems will occur.

The second article is about the digital work environment in health care and research on medical records online for patients. It also describes the DISA project.

Bad IT systems are a contributing factor to stress among healthcare employees according to the researcher Åsa Cajander, who examining a nurse’s digital work environment.

Read the full articles here (pp 3)!

Would you like to do your Master Thesis with the HTO Group?

We are always interested in working together with master students that are interested in our area of expertise. Have a look at our research projects presented in this blog, or read about them in the project page. Looks interesting? Then contact us to know more.

We are especially interested in students who would like to look into Scrum and how to incorporate users, digital work environment studies, eHealth and studies related to medical records online.

PhD Thesis: The Importance of eHealth Innovations: Lessons about Patient Accessible Information

Sofie Wass successfully defended her PhD thesis last week at Jönköping University, and I was the opponent at the defense. The thesis is about eHealth Innovations and consist on work related to two eHealth innovations: medical records online for patients & the service “My referrals”. Two papers are on medical records online for patients in her thesis.

Sofie Wass included five publications in her thesis and she has used an unusual variety of methods in her papers. You find 1) one literature study on open innovation and eHealth, 2) one interview study with experts and decision makers in health care, 3) one study on using business models for eHealth including interviews, a workshop and observations, and finally also 4) one study using interviews and 5) a survey to health care professionals and one to patients.

The thesis is well worth reading for those who are in the eHealth and innovations area. The introduction text includes an overview of eHealth in Sweden with some of the major milestones described around the progress of eHealth. Here one can read that the official work with strategic work in eHealth started as late as 2002, and that the coordination of eHealth in Sweden has been coordinated by different organizations throughout the years.

There are also some interesting facts found in the thesis such as, here presented randomly:

70% of all eHealth projects fail to achieve their goals 🙁
There are few studies on eHealth and Open innovation: Only 18 papers were found in her literature study.
Test results is the feature in medical records online that is highest ranked as an additional feature to rank in Jönköping county
Professionals working in outpatient clinics were less positive towards medical records online for patients than those in primary care.

Visitors at the HTO group and IKEA Sightseeing

We have had Leysan Nurgalieva, Marta Larusdottir and Shweta Premadanan visiting the HTO group the last weeks. You find some blog posts about their work here and here.

Apart from excellent work with data collection such as interviews, we also did some planning of studies and funding applications. And we also had time for some social activities. One night we went out for dinner together with the HTO group, and we really had a nice evening. I still remember the mailing about James Bond afterwards that was hilarious.

We also did some brief sightseeing to get the cultural experience of Sweden. And what can be more Swedish than IKEA in combination with the traditional Swedish Christmas table? After the full tour of IKEA, our guests had the opportunity to try the different herrings, sausages and other things they served at the IKEA Christmas table. And of course, some Swedish meatballs!