As I mentioned in yesterday’s blog post, Åsa Cajander and I had a presentation to carry out at the Medical Informatics Europe conference today. We got 11 minutes to present (which is a really short time if you want to describe a study and its results in a good way) and we were done after 11.03 minutes! I started with presenting myself, Åsa and the DOME consortium (the image above, taken by our colleague Hanife Rexhepi, is from that phase of the presentation) and then moved on to introduce Journalen, the patients accessible electronic health record system in Sweden, and the interview study with nurses. Åsa then continued by going through the four main themes that were found during the analysis (themes related to the effect of Journalen on the nurses’ work environment and their communication with patients); “Altered contacts”, “Increased workload”, “Creates uncertainty” and “Requires new knowledge”. You can read more about these themes and results related to them in the paper which you can find a direct DOI link to here.

I concluded by highlighting some important take-away messages from the study:
• The enhanced communication, which Journalen is perceived to give, is key to shared decision making!
• Both nurses and physicians see a risk with patients accessing unsigned notes and increased workload when patients request clarifications
• There is an identified need to educate both medical professionals and patients in how to use systems like Journalen

Usually, after you have presented something at a conference, you can relax for a bit but that wasn’t the case for Åsa and me. A few rooms away, our DOME colleague Maria Hägglund presented the study Timing It Right – Patients’ Online Access to Their Record Notes in Sweden in a session parallel to ours. Luckily, we managed to switch rooms in time for her presentation. I will write a separate post about that later.

Tomorrow, I will be presenting again – this time at Vitalis. The same goes for several other DOME colleague as well as representatives from Inera. After a nice dinner with several colleagues from Uppsala University and DOME, Hanife and I had a test run of our presentation, which will take the form of a role-play contrasting physicians’ and patients’ views on Journalen. That will be an interesting experience! We have two hours (13:00-15:00 in room A5) with several short presentations using different presentation modes as well as Mentimeter questions for the audience. If you are at Vitalis and are interested in Journalen and similar health record systems, I can really recommend that session.