Tag: DISA

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?

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!

EIT Health/ACM SIGCHI eHealth Summer School 2017, week 2 in Stockholm and Uppsala

It was great to see everyone again at the second week of the EIT/SIGCHI summer school! It was now already three weeks ago, and I thought I should write a short blog post. The week started at the visualization studio at The Royal Institute of Technology, KTH, Stockholm. We had all prepared a Pecha Kucha – a two minutes presentation about ourselves. It was great to hear about everyone’s research! The afternoon was focused on action research, with discussions about the pros and cons and presentations by Bengt Sandblad from Uppsala University, and the organizers of the second summer school week Jan Gulliksen from KTH and Åsa Cajander from Uppsala University (and the HTO group).

The second day all participants travelled to Uppsala, and the lectures took place in Gustavianum which is the oldest building of Uppsala University. The themes of the day were medical records online and a new surgical planning system implemented at the University Hospital in Uppsala. The lectures were held by Benny Eklund, IT strategist at Uppsala county council, Birgitta Wallgren who is a manager at Uppsala University Hospital, and Gunnar Enlund, chief physician at Uppsala University Hospital. My colleagues Christiane Grünloh, Åsa Cajander, and Jonas Moll also presented results from their studies regarding medical records online!

Wednesday we were back in Stockholm and had a workshop most of the day. We started with trying out different technologies such as VR glasses and tabletop computers. After lunch we had a teamwork exercise where we all developed a computer game together. My group’s task was to create the game sounds and we had a lot of fun doing so, even if we discovered some mistakes when our work was integrated with the rest of the game.

Thursday and Friday we had lectures and also groupwork! It was a great week with many interesting lectures. Read more details about the week in Jonas blog; Day 1, Day 2, Day 3, Day 4, Day 5!

HTO and DISA planning activities

Last Monday, two workshops aimed at framing and planning future work activities were conducted within the HTO group. The first one concerned different aspects of the work environment within the HTO group and the second activity aimed specifically at planning the DISA project.

During the HTO workshop, we used the affinity diagram technique to map out aspects of the work environment that we liked and aspects where we felt improvements were needed. We started out by writing down our thoughts about good and not so good aspects on post-its for a few minutes whereafter we gathered by a whiteboard on which we arranged our positive remarks in columns with related notes. After all notes had been added to the whiteboard each column was labeled to make it clear which areas worked well. Among the identified positive aspects were; good support and organization, good athmosphere and good ability to communicate to the public. When we were done with the positive side we did the same for the negative aspects that needed some degree of improvement. Among the negative aspects we found; somewhat unclear boundaries between pojects, hard to get an overview of what everyone is doing and sometimes too much information in the HTO slack channels.

Later on the same day we had the workshop for planning the DISA project. Diane, Ida and I planned the workshop and invited the other DISA members to the two hour activity. Everyone started out by writing down 2-3 studies they would like to perform within the scope of the project (some of these studies had already started). This was to make sure that every participant got the chance to express what they wanted from the project.  Those who could not attend sent their ideas to one of the participating colleagues before the workshop. After about 15 minutes everyone presented their ideas shortly and put their notes on the whiteboard. Again, the affinity diagram technique was used to cluster ideas from different participants into categories. On the picture above Diane has just started the process of assigning a label to each of the categories. On the poster to the left of the post-its the main parts of the DISA project are mapped out. The next step was to match the proposed studies to the different parts of DISA shown on the poster. This exercise resulted in a study being added – this was needed in order to make sure that the last year of the project was sufficiently covered.

The second hour of the workshop was devoted to placing the proposed and already ongoing studies on a timeline, drawn on another whiteboard, which contained relevant deadlines (like conference submission dates, special issue deadlines and dates when individual project members’ contracts with the University went out). After we had placed the studies we were conducting, or wanted to conduct, during the first year on the timeline we added information about who should lead the different studies. The end result of this workshop activity was the timeline which clearly showed all the important dates, studies and responsibilities.

Several guest researchers visiting us this week!

Several guests, that are involved in joint eHealth projects with Åsa Cajander and me, have been visiting us this week. The blog picture was taken yesterday and shows, from left to right, me, Christiane Grünloh (KTH, TH Köln), Gunilla Myreteg (Örebro University) and Maria Hägglund (Karolinska institutet).

Christiane Grünloh, who is a Ph.D. student from the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH) and living in Germany, will be with us this entire week to work with us on a large observation/interview/survey study which will be conducted with physicians and nurses at Uppsala University hospital. She is also a member of the HTO group, but is mostly connecting from Germany via Skype. We have been working mostly on refining the interview template, since we have not yet conducted any interviews. Yesterday, Gunilla Myreteg from Örebro University and Maria Hägglund from Karolinska Institutet also joined in to, among other things, help us finalize and pilot the interview template. It was a very productive day – it’s nice to sit down with colleagues you don’t meet that often to really focus on a common task. Those who want to know more about our study at the oncology department, which is a part of the DISA project as well as the larger DOME consortium, can read this blog post for an introduction of the entire research team behind the study and this blog post for an introduction of the different parts of the study.

While all of us were gathered, we also took the chance to work on the first paper based on a large national patient survey, which we and several other researchers within the DOME consortium are also a part of. And of course we couldn’t just split up after being done working – we had to end the day at a nice Italian restaurant here in Uppsala!  🙂