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Background:
Contact tracing apps are potentially useful tools for supporting national COVID-19 containment strategies. Various national apps with different technical design features have been commissioned and issued by governments worldwide.
Objective:
Our goal was to develop and propose an item set that was suitable for describing and monitoring nationally issued COVID-19 contact tracing apps. This item set could provide a framework for describing the key technical features of such apps and monitoring their use based on widely available information.
Methods:
We used an open-source intelligence approach (OSINT) to access a multitude of publicly available sources and collect data and information regarding the development and use of contact tracing apps in different countries over several months (from June 2020 to January 2021). The collected documents were then iteratively analyzed via content analysis methods. During this process, an initial set of subject areas were refined into categories for evaluation (ie, coherent topics), which were then examined for individual features. These features were paraphrased as items in the form of questions and applied to information materials from a sample of countries (ie, Brazil, China, Finland, France, Germany, Italy, Singapore, South Korea, Spain, and the United Kingdom [England and Wales]). This sample was purposefully selected; our intention was to include the apps of different countries from around the world and to propose a valid item set that can be relatively easily applied by using an OSINT approach.
Results:
Our OSINT approach and subsequent analysis of the collected documents resulted in the definition of the following five main categories and associated subcategories: (1) background information (open-source code, public information, and collaborators); (2) purpose and workflow (secondary data use and warning process design); (3) technical information (protocol, tracing technology, exposure notification system, and interoperability); (4) privacy protection (the entity of trust and anonymity); and (5) availability and use (release date and the number of downloads). Based on this structure, a set of items that constituted the evaluation framework were specified. The application of these items to the 10 selected countries revealed differences, especially with regard to the centralization of the entity of trust and the overall transparency of the apps’ technical makeup.
Conclusions:
We provide a set of criteria for monitoring and evaluating COVID-19 tracing apps that can be easily applied to publicly issued information. The application of these criteria might help governments to identify design features that promote the successful, widespread adoption of COVID-19 tracing apps among target populations and across national boundaries.
Objective: The more people there are who use clinical information systems (CIS) beyond their traditional intramural confines, the more promising the benefits are, and the more daunting the risks will be. This review thus explores the areas of ethical debates prompted by CIS conceptualized as smart systems reaching out to patients and citizens. Furthermore, it investigates the ethical competencies and education needed to use these systems appropriately.
Methods: A literature review covering ethics topics in combination with clinical and health information systems, clinical decision support, health information exchange, and various mobile devices and media was performed searching the MEDLINE database for articles from 2016 to 2019 with a focus on 2018 and 2019. A second search combined these keywords with education.
Results: By far, most of the discourses were dominated by privacy, confidentiality, and informed consent issues. Intertwined with confidentiality and clear boundaries, the provider-patient relationship has gained much attention. The opacity of algorithms and the lack of explicability of the results pose a further challenge. The necessity of sociotechnical ethics education was underpinned in many studies including advocating education for providers and patients alike. However, only a few publications expanded on ethical competencies. In the publications found, empirical research designs were employed to capture the stakeholders’ attitudes, but not to evaluate specific implementations.
Conclusion: Despite the broad discourses, ethical values have not yet found their firm place in empirically rigorous health technology evaluation studies. Similarly, sociotechnical ethics competencies obviously need detailed specifications. These two gaps set the stage for further research at the junction of clinical information systems and ethics.
Background: Clinical handovers at changes of shifts are typical scenarios of time restricted and information intensive communication, which are highly cognitively demanding. The currently available applications supporting handovers typically present complex information in a textual checklist-like manner. This presentation style has been criticised for not meeting the specific user requirements.
Objectives: We, therefore, aimed at developing a concept for visualising the overview of a clinical case that serves as an alternative way to checklist-like presentations in clinical handovers. We also aimed at implementing this concept in a handoverEHR in order to support the pre-handover phase, the actual handover, and the post-handover phase as well as at evaluating its usability and attractiveness.
Results: We developed and implemented a concept that draws on Tolman's pioneering work on cognitive maps that we designed in accordance with Gestalt principles. These maps provide a pictorial overview of a clinical case. The application to build, manipulate, and store the cognitive maps was integrated into an openEHR based handover record that extends conventional records with handover specific information. Usability (n = 28) and attractiveness (n = 26) testing with experienced clinicians resulted in good ratings for suitability for the task as well as for attractiveness and pragmatism.
Conclusion: We propose cognitive maps to represent and visualise the clinical case in situations where there is limited time to present complex information.
While Nursing Informatics competencies seem essential for the daily work of nurses, they are not formally integrated into nursing education in Austria, Germany and Switzerland, nor are there any national educational recommendations. The aim of this paper is to show how such recommendations can be developed, what competency areas are most relevant in the three countries and how the recommendations can be implemented in practice. To this end, a triple iterative procedure was proposed and applied starting with national health informatics recommendations for other professionals, matching and enriching these findings with topics from the international literature and finally validating them in an expert survey with 87 experts and in focus group sessions. Out of the 24 compiled competency areas, the relevance ratings of the following four recommended areas achieved values above 90%: nursing documentation (including terminologies), principles of nursing informatics, data protection and security, and quality assurance and quality management. As there were no significant differences between the three countries, these findings laid the foundation of the DACH Recommendations of Nursing Informatics as joint German (D), Austrian (A), and Swiss (CH) recommendations in Nursing Informatics. The methodology proposed has been utilized internationally, which demonstrates the added value of this study also outside the confines of Austria, Germany, Switzerland.
Die Gesundheitstelematik unterstützt die Versorgungskontinuität und fördert damit die Patientensicherheit. In Anlehnung an den eArztbrief wurde an der FH Osnabrück der elektronische Pflegebericht entwickelt. Mit dem ePflegebe-richt leistet die Pflege einen ersten wichtigen Beitrag zur Gestaltung eigener gesundheitstelematischer Anwendungen.
Background: Availability and usage of individual IT applications have been studied intensively in the past years. Recently, IT support of clinical processes is attaining increasing attention. The underlying construct that describes the IT support of clinical workflows is clinical information logistics. This construct needs to be better understood, operationalised and measured.
Objectives: It is therefore the aim of this study to propose and develop a workflow composite score (WCS) for measuring clinical information logistics and to examine its quality based on reliability and validity analyses.
Methods: We largely followed the procedural model of MacKenzie and colleagues (2011) for defining and conceptualising the construct domain, for developing the measurement instrument, assessing the content validity, pretesting the instrument, specifying the model, capturing the data and computing the WCS and testing the reliability and validity.
Results: Clinical information logistics was decomposed into the descriptors data and information, function, integration and distribution, which embraced the framework validated by an analysis of the international literature. This framework was refined selecting representative clinical processes. We chose ward rounds, pre- and post-surgery processes and discharge as sample processes that served as concrete instances for the measurements. They are sufficiently complex, represent core clinical processes and involve different professions, departments and settings. The score was computed on the basis of data from 183 hospitals of different size, ownership, location and teaching status. Testing the reliability and validity yielded encouraging results: the reliability was high with r(split-half) = 0.89, the WCS discriminated between groups; the WCS correlated significantly and moderately with two EHR models and the WCS received good evaluation results by a sample of chief information officers (n = 67). These findings suggest the further utilisation of the WCS.
Conclusion: As the WCS does not assume ideal workflows as a gold standard but measures IT support of clinical workflows according to validated descriptors a high portability of the WCS to other hospitals in other countries is very likely. The WCS will contribute to a better understanding of the construct clinical information logistics.
Background: Continuous improvements of IT-performance in healthcare organisations require actionable performance indicators, regularly conducted, independent measurements and meaningful and scalable reference groups. Existing IT-benchmarking initiatives have focussed on the development of reliable and valid indicators, but less on the questions about how to implement an environment for conducting easily repeatable and scalable IT-benchmarks.
Objectives: This study aims at developing and trialling a procedure that meets the afore-mentioned requirements.
Methods: We chose a well established, regularly conducted (inter-) national IT-survey of healthcare organisations (IT-Report Healthcare) as the environment and offered the participants of the 2011 survey (CIOs of hospitals) to enter a benchmark. The 61 structural and functional performance indicators covered among others the implementation status and integration of IT-systems and functions, global user satisfaction and the resources of the IT-department. Healthcare organisations were grouped by size and ownership. The benchmark results were made available electronically and feedback on the use of these results was requested after several months.
Results: Fifty-ninehospitals participated in the benchmarking. Reference groups consisted of up to 141 members depending on the number of beds (size) and the ownership (public vs. private). A total of 122 charts showing single indicator frequency views were sent to each participant. The evaluation showed that 94.1% of the CIOs who participated in the evaluation considered this benchmarking beneficial and reported that they would enter again. Based on the feedback of the participants we developed two additional views that provide a more consolidated picture.
Conclusion: The results demonstrate that establishing an independent, easily repeatable and scalable IT-benchmarking procedure is possible and was deemed desirable. Based on these encouraging results a new benchmarking round which includes process indicators is currently conducted.
Background: Clinical information logistics is the backbone of care workflows inside and outside of hospitals. Due to the great potential of health IT to support clinical processes its contribution needs to be regularly monitored and governed. IT benchmarks are a well-known instrument to optimise the availability and use of IT by guiding the decision making process. The aim of this study was to translate IT benchmarking results that were grounded on a hierarchical workflow scoring system into an appropriate visualisation concept.
Methods: To this end, a three-dimensional multi-level model was developed, which allowed the decomposition of the highly aggregated workflow composite score into score views for the individual clinical workflows concerned and for the descriptors of these workflows. Furthermore this multi-level model helped to break down the score views into single and multiple indicator views.
Results: The results could be visualised per hospital in comparison to the results of organisations of similar size and ownership (peer reference groups) and in comparison to different types of innovation adopters. The multi-level model was implemented in a benchmark of 199 hospitals and evaluated by the chief information officers. The evaluation resulted in high ratings for the comprehensibility of the different types of views of the scores and indicators.
Conclusions: The implementation of the multi-level model in a large benchmark of hospitals proved to be feasible and useful in terms of the overall structure and the different indicator views. There seems to be a preference for less complex and familiar views.
Die Roboterfalle
(2018)
Die Zukunft ist elektronisch
(2013)
Eine Studie der Hochschule Osnabrück zeigt: Der elektronische Pflegebericht ist in der Lage, alle für Pflegende relevanten patientenbezogenen Daten zu transportieren. Zugleich schafft er viele neue Möglichkeiten, Informationen weiterzugeben. Insgesamt lassen sich wesentlich mehr und detailliertere Informationen übermitteln als bislang über Papier.
Dienstleister oder Diktator?
(2016)
Die IT in der Rolle eines Dienstleisters zu sehen, ist an unseren Krankenhäusern leider selten Realität. Denn der IT-Diktator zieht gerne in Form überbordender IT-gestützter Dokumentation durch die Arzt- und Stationszimmer. Das sei dann dem „Diktat der DRG" geschuldet, so die Begründung. Aber muss das so sein?
Background:
While aiming for the same goal of building a national eHealth Infrastructure, Germany and the United States pursued different strategic approaches – particularly regarding the role of promoting the adoption and usage of hospital Electronic Health Records (EHR).
Objective:
To measure and model the diffusion dynamics of EHRs in German hospital care and to contrast the results with the developments in the US.
Materials and methods:
All acute care hospitals that were members of the German statutory health system were surveyed during the period 2007–2017 for EHR adoption. Bass models were computed based on the German data and the corresponding data of the American Hospital Association (AHA) from non-federal hospitals in order to model and explain the diffusion of innovation.
Results:
While the diffusion dynamics observed in the US resembled the typical s-shaped curve with high imitation effects (q = 0.583) but with a relatively low innovation effect (p = 0.025), EHR diffusion in Germany stagnated with adoption rates of approx. 50% (imitation effect q = -0.544) despite a higher innovation effect (p = 0.303).
Discussion:
These findings correlate with different governmental strategies in the US and Germany of financially supporting EHR adoption. Imitation only seems to work if there are financial incentives, e.g. those of the HITECH Act in the US. They are lacking in Germany, where the government left health IT adoption strategies solely to the free market and the consensus among all of the stakeholders.
Conclusion:
Bass diffusion models proved to be useful for distinguishing the diffusion dynamics in German and US non-federal hospitals. When applying the Bass model, the imitation parameter needs a broader interpretation beyond the network effects, including driving forces such as incentives and regulations, as was demonstrated by this study.
Objectives: This study aimed at the construction of what the core of eHealth policy making is, offering new perspectives about high priority procedures along the policy making process
Methods: Following Grounded Theory methodology, 59 qualitative telephone interviews with a broad variety of stakeholders from Austria, Switzerland and Germany were conducted
Results: The findings hinted at five priorities of eHealth policy making: strategy, consensus-building, decision-making, implementation and evaluation that emerged from the stakeholders’ perception of the eHealth policy. Hereby strategy, consensus-building and implementation gained the highest attention
Conclusions: These findings suggest three high priorities in eHealth policy: 1) developing and pursuing a consistent eHealth strategy, 2) investing time and resources into consensus-building to clear up difficulties early on in the process, 3) governing implementation towards serving patient care through systems fit for practice.
Public Interest Summary: Digitalisation is playing an increasingly crucial role in providing high quality health care. However, different countries have pursued different political paths. In this study, we wanted to know how the stakeholders perceived the political process in their country to identify strengths and weaknesses. We, therefore, conducted interviews about digital health policy with experts from Austria, Switzerland and Germany covering the full spectrum of stakeholders. The findings suggest three political musts: 1) a convincing and coherent strategy followed throughout the entire process, 2) consensus- building among the stakeholders, 3) using “fit for practice” as the yardstick to measure political success.
Elektronisch unterstützte transsektorale Kommunikation im Gesundheitswesen ist eine der essentiellen Säulen von eHealth. Sie ist eine menschliche Handlung, die eine Verbesserung der Versorgung Einzelner und ganzer Bevölkerungsgruppen bewirken soll. Ethik bewertet menschliches Handeln in Bezug auf dessen Auswirkungen und die ihm zugrunde liegenden Werte und Normen. Dabei werden die Auswirkungen auf Individuen und Allgemeinheiten betrachtet. Im Gesundheits- und Sozialwesen gelten die Prinzipien der Autonomie, der Schadensverhütung, der Fürsorge und der Gerechtigkeit als Maßstäbe. Es gilt also die Fragen herauszuarbeiten, die an elektronische transsektorale Kommunikation aus ethischer Sicht gestellt werden müssen, um zu untersuchen, ob sie innerhalb der genannten Prinzipien ethischen Anforderungen genügt.
Aus den Ergebnissen einer systematischen Literaturrecherche wurden zunächst allgemein Aussagen zum Thema Information und Technologie im Zusammenhang mit Ethik extrahiert, und daraufhin geprüft, auf welche Fragen sie Antworten anbieten. Diese wurden innerhalb der genannten fünf Prinzipien als Fragen an elektronische transsektorale Kommunikation formuliert.
Aus den Aussagen der Literatur ließen sich sieben Fragen ableiten und den ethischen Prinzipien zuordnen, um mit ihnen elektronische transsektorale Kommunikation zu untersuchen. Auf diese Weise kann geprüft werden ob diese in der Lage sind, das Wohl Einzelner wie auch von Gemeinschaften im Gesundheitswesen zu fördern, wovon Betroffene, Professionelle und das Gesundheitssystem insgesamt profitieren könnten.
Hintergrund: Mangelhafte Informationsübermittlung führt bei der Überleitung Pflegebedürftiger zu einer Gefährdung von Sicherheit und Lebensqualität. Elektronische Instrumente können diese Situation grundsätzlich verbessern, werden jedoch bislang kaum eingesetzt. Ein Grund ist die fehlende Umsetzung von IT Standards.
Ziel der Arbeit: Ziel dieser Studie ist daher die technisch-organisatorische Machbarkeit, die Gebrauchstauglichkeit, Nützlichkeit und Vollständigkeit einer elektronisch unterstützten standardisierten Pflegeüberleitung zu untersuchen.
Material und Methoden: Zu diesem Zweck wurde eine Test-Telematikinfrastruktur aufgebaut, die die elektronische Gesundheitskarte einbezog, sowie ein HL7 CDA basiertes Überleitungsinstrument entwickelt, das den Informationsaustausch zwischen einem Krankenhaus und Pflegeheimen ermöglichte. Die Anwender bewerteten die Gebrauchstauglichkeit des Überleitungsinstruments, sowie die Nützlichkeit und Vollständigkeit von elektronischen und papierbasierten Überleitungen.
Ergebnisse: Es zeigte sich, dass das elektronische Überleitungsinstrument auf Basis des HL7 CDA Standards im Rahmen der Test-Telematikinfrastruktur technisch umgesetzt und von den Anwendern als gebrauchstauglich eingeschätzt werden konnte. Im Vergleich lieferte die elektronische Überleitung vollständigere und nützlichere Daten als die Papierform. Die Anwendung der elektronischen Gesundheitskarte (eGK) wurde von den Anwendern als hemmend eingestuft.
Diskussion: Die Studie unterstreicht die Machbarkeit, Bedeutung sowie die Barrieren von elektronischen Überleitungen von Pflegebedürftigen. Pflegende aus dem Krankenhaus- und Langzeitpflegebereich können eine auf dem HL7 CDA Standard ePflegebericht basierende Anwendung in ihre Abläufe integrieren und erhalten dadurch bessere und vollständigere Informationen. Zur langfristigen Sicherstellung der Versorgungskontinuität sollte der HL7 CDA Standard ePflegebericht Teil der deutschen Telematik-Infrastruktur werden.
Background:
Chronic health conditions are on the rise and are putting high economic pressure on health systems, as they require well-coordinated prevention and treatment. Among chronic conditions, chronic wounds such as cardiovascular leg ulcers have a high prevalence. Their treatment is highly interdisciplinary and regularly spans multiple care settings and organizations; this places particularly high demands on interoperable information exchange that can be achieved using international semantic standards, such as Systematized Nomenclature of Medicine-Clinical Terms (SNOMED CT).
Objective:
This study aims to investigate the expressiveness of SNOMED CT in the domain of wound care, and thereby its clinical usefulness and the potential need for extensions.
Methods:
A clinically consented and profession-independent wound care item set, the German National Consensus for the Documentation of Leg Wounds (NKDUC), was mapped onto the precoordinated concepts of the international reference terminology SNOMED CT. Before the mapping took place, the NKDUC was transformed into an information model that served to systematically identify relevant items. The mapping process was carried out in accordance with the ISO/TR 12300 formalism. As a result, the reliability, equivalence, and coverage rate were determined for all NKDUC items and sections.
Results:
The developed information model revealed 268 items to be mapped. Conducted by 3 health care professionals, the mapping resulted in moderate reliability (κ=0.512). Regarding the two best equivalence categories (symmetrical equivalence of meaning), the coverage rate of SNOMED CT was 67.2% (180/268) overall and 64.3% (108/168) specifically for wounds. The sections general medical condition (55/66, 83%), wound assessment (18/24, 75%), and wound status (37/57, 65%), showed higher coverage rates compared with the sections therapy (45/73, 62%), wound diagnostics (8/14, 57%), and patient demographics (17/34, 50%).
Conclusions:
The results yielded acceptable reliability values for the mapping procedure. The overall coverage rate shows that two-thirds of the items could be mapped symmetrically, which is a substantial portion of the source item set. Some wound care sections, such as general medical conditions and wound assessment, were covered better than other sections (wound status, diagnostics, and therapy). These deficiencies can be mitigated either by postcoordination or by the inclusion of new concepts in SNOMED CT. This study contributes to pushing interoperability in the domain of wound care, thereby responding to the high demand for information exchange in this field. Overall, this study adds another puzzle piece to the general knowledge about SNOMED CT in terms of its clinical usefulness and its need for further extensions.