Month: November 2019

DOME · eHealth · Medical Records Online

Just submitted an abstract to a Frontiers research topic!

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Frontiers_AbstractSubmit

Today was the last day to submit abstracts to the Frontiers research topic “Personalized Digital Health and Patient-centric Services”, which I introduced in this blog post. Earlier today I submitted an abstract for a theoretically oriented article on the use of patient accessible electronic health records that I will write together with some of my colleagues in the DOME consortium. Since there will be a rigorous review process I will not give any more details about it here and now.

The fact is that I will drive the work with yet another article that will be submitted to the same research topic and I will also be a co-author on a third one. Unfortunately, there was not enough time to submit abstracts for these (abstract submission is not mandatory). All articles focus on different aspects of patient accessible electronic health records. Obviously, there will be a lot of writing this upcoming spring!

The important deadline to remember is March 31st, when manuscripts should be submitted to the research topic. I think this is a very good opportunity for those who conduct eHealth research that fits the topic – and you still have about four months to write a manuscript! See the blog post linked above for some more details and a link to the submission site.

communication · conference · Pedagogy · Social media in higher education

Time to engage more in pedagogical research!

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These last couple of weeks I have been working on different pedagogical papers together with my colleague Pernilla Josefsson from Södertörn University. The first concrete research outcome from the work is a conference paper which was submitted to a pedagogical conference last Thursday.

The paper focuses on the results of a study performed within the scope of the pedagogical project course, introduced here, that I took during my time as a postdoc researcher at Uppsala University. The study focused on how a teacher-administrated Facebook group could be used as a complementary communication channel in one of my own courses. I will write more about this in case the paper is accepted.

We have also worked on a journal paper about the study on the use of Twitter in one of my courses in communication at KTH, which I have mentioned in several earlier blog posts. We will most probably be able to submit the manuscript to a pedagogical journal within the next couple of weeks. When published, this will most definitely be my largest contribution to pedagogical research to date!

We also plan to submit a pedagogical conference paper about research on the use of social media in higher education courses (theoretical paper, including some concrete examples). An additional conference paper based on data from the above mentioned Twitter study will also be submitted to a conference later in spring 2020.

The research contributions mentioned above focus mostly on data which has already been gathered. I don’t think we can do much more with this earlier data, so it’s about time that we start looking for opportunities for gathering of new data. One possible option would be to conduct a new study on the use of Twitter or Facebook groups within the scope of a course in interaction design which I will lead at Örebro University during May and June 2020. I will write more about this possibility, as well as other possibilities for pedagogical research on course development and design, when I introduce the course in a later blog post.

conference · DOME · eHealth · Grant application · Medical Records Online · Vitalis

New DOME conference and a visit from University of Iowa!

Jonas Moll1 Comment

Last Thursday evening I returned home to Stockholm after some very rewarding days at University of Skövde, where we had this fall’s DOME conference. Before travelling to Skövde Tuesday morning, I also spent a day at Uppsala University where I met Carolyn Turvey from the department of psychiatry at the University of Iowa. Carolyn has, like the researchers in DOME, a research focus on eHealth and patient portals. Thus, this has been a week with a heavy focus on eHealth research in different contexts. There is a lot to say about what was going on during these days so I will just bring up some general points here and then focus on different parts in later blog posts.

During the Monday, Carolyn came to the department of Information Technology at Uppsala University to meet me and another colleague (visiting researcher) from the same research group – Magdelena Stadin. When it comes to eHealth and patient portals, Carolyn’s focus is on the My HealtheVet portal for the Veteran Affairs in the United States. The original idea was that I should meet Carolyn only during the morning, but because of different unforeseen events we spent the entire day together discussing different projects and implementations of patient portals. It was very interesting to discuss Sweden’s version of the patient accessible electronic health record and compare it with My HealtheVet. The basic ideas behind these systems are similar – that patients should be able to access e.g. visit notes, test results and medication lists online – but the implementations are totally different! I will write more about this in a later blog post. During the last hour at Uppsala University Carolyn held an interesting guest presentation, about an evaluation of My HealtheVet, which some other members of my former department joined.

During the Tuesday and Wednesday, the DOME researchers gathered for this fall’s two-day conference. Rose-Mharie Åhlfeldt hosted the conference at the University of Skövde. Unfortunately, Carolyn and I were the only researchers who could actually travel to the university and be present during both days. Several others, however, joined us via Zoom. The first day started with lunch, after which Carolyn held a short presentation about her work with My HealtheVet. Her presentation was, once again, very appreciated and it is clear that we have many shared research interests! I will write more about these in other blog posts. During the rest of the afternoon Maria Hägglund led a discussion about a new research grant application to NordForsk which we will write during the fall, together with partners from other Nordic countries (Norway and Finland, among others). The focus will of course be on different aspects of patient portals. We came up with several interesting ideas for future research in the area so I think we will end up with a strong application! We ended the day by going to dinner at a very interesting restaurant where you order everything on your phone!

During Wednesday morning, after some additional discussions about the NordForsk application, I held a presentation where I showed some results from the large inteview/survey/observation study at Uppsala University Hospital. I will get back to that in a later blog post. You can also read about the survey study, on the effects of patient accessible electronic health records on the work of oncology professionals, in this blog post. During the rest of the time before lunch Isabella Scandurra led a discussion about next year’s DOME session at Vitalis. I think we ended up with a very interesting agenda, including some presentations, panels, some role play (of course!) and strategies for involving the audience. I will get back to this later on (you can read about an earlier DOME session at Vitalis here). This was the last point on this fall’s DOME conference agenda.

During the late Wednesday afternoon and most of the Thursday I met with another DOME colleague in Skövde – Hanife Rexhepi. Since she couldn’t attend the conference we decided to meet afterwards instead. We have a lot of things going on related to planned grant applications and ongoing work with several journal manuscripts. We had interesting discussions which, among other things, resulted in a version of a journal manuscript which I could submit to a journal the day after! During most of the time we took some longer walks in Skövde – a really nice town! During one of those walks I took the above blog image.

DOME · eHealth · Medical Records Online · National patient survey · Popular science

Our eHealth studies are covered in the news again!

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Health Informatics Journal

As I wrote in this earlier blog post, Åsa Cajander and I recently got a new eHealth study published on the effect of patient accessible electronic health records on the work environment of oncology care professionals (see blog image). You can find the open access article here. This press release was published around the same time and the intention was of course to spread our results to the general public. Our hope was that journalists from e.g. popular science journals would find the content of the press release interesting and publish their own versions.

Although this study does not seem to have generated the same interest as in this and this case, there is at least one popular science article published about our new study. That article was published in the journal Vårdfokus, which is a monthly journal for the members of The Swedish Association of Health Professionals (they also publish articles on a daily bases online, reaching a larger audience). The main focus of this popular science article is that there is indeed some more work and changed routines as a consequence of patients being able to access their medical records online, even though the effects were not as large as originally feared.

The article in Vårdfokus, which you can find here (in Swedish), is definitely inspired by our press release, but has a somewhat different focus. The journalist also contacted Åsa Cajander before writing the article, to discuss the study! The article ends with the following quote from Åsa:

These results nevertheless show that there were not as large effects on the work of the healthcare professionals as compared to the enormous concerns that existed when Journalen was introduced. But certainly both physicians and nurses have had to adapt, especially when it comes to how and what they document.

In the article in Vårdfokus there is also a link to another article which they have written about two of our earlier eHealth studies. Aside from combining one study on the patients’ perspective (the national patient survey) and one study on the professionals’ perspective (on effects of patient accessible electronic health records on perceived risks of threats and violence), they also include quotes from an interview with Åsa!