Month: September 2021

DOME · eHealth · Medical Records Online · National patient survey

New article published about patients’ preferred ways of receiving bad health news in an era of digital health

Jonas MollLeave a comment

As I wrote in this blog post, a conference paper that was submitted to and presented at the The International Symposium for Health Information Management Research (ISHIMR 2020) was selected for publication in Health Informatics Journal. The journal version was recently published with the open access option and is available here! The title of the publication is “Do you want to receive bad news through your patient accessible electronic health record? A national survey on receiving bad news in an era of digital health”. My colleague Hanife Rexhepi from University of Skövde is the main author and the co-authors are, aside from me, Isto Huvila from Uppsala University and Rose-Mharie Åhlfeldt from University of Skövde. All of us are members of the DOME consortium and the NORDeHEALTH project.

The study presented in the article focuses on results from two questions in a large Swedish patient survey on patients’ attitudes towards and experiences with the patient accessible electronic health record service Journalen. The questions in focus were: “How do you receive bad news about your health from your health care provider?” and “How would you want to receive bad news about your health?” The response options were (short versions): “Phone”, “During visit”, “Physical letter”, “Journalen”, “Other”. The results were quite interesting, especially when it comes to the proportion of patients who received bad news by reading about them in Journalen (~2.0%) compared with the proportion of patients who want to receive bad news by reading about them in Journalen (~17.7%). There is a big difference here, even though the majority still wants to receive bad news via phone or during a visit. It is important to note here that patients who get notified about bad health news through Journalen have not yet discussed the results with e.g. a physician.

Even though healthcare professionals generally have a more positive attitude towards Journalen nowadays, physicians, especially within oncology, worry about patients finding out about bad health news on their own through this e-service. This is interesting to relate to the findings from the newly published study. We are definitely living in an era of digital health, and maybe this has changed, and will continue to change, how we want to receive bad news about our health.

Earlier today, a Swedish news article as well as a press release about the study was published by Örebro University. You can find the news article here.

I also want to mention the following article that was published in the same special issue in Health Informatics Journal (Hanife is first author even on this one, and Isto and Rose-Mharie co-authors!):

Here is the abstract of our newly published study:

Despite the fact that patient accessible electronic health records (PAEHRs) have been around for many years in several countries, there is a lack of research investigating patient’s preferences for receiving bad news, including through PAEHRs. Little is also known about the characteristics of the patients who prefer to receive bad news through the PAEHR in terms of, for example medical diagnosis, age and educational level. This study, based on a national patient survey in Sweden (N = 2587), investigated this. Results show that, generally, receiving bad news by reading in the PAEHR is still among the least preferred options. Additionally, a higher proportion of men want to receive bad news in the PAEHR compared to women (p = 0.001), and the same goes for those who are not working/have worked in healthcare (p = 0.007). An effect of disease groups was also found, showing that diabetes patients in particular, want to receive bad news through the PAEHR.

eHealth · Haptics · Medical Records Online · Multimodality · Pedagogy

Publications from the first half of my assistant professorship at Örebro University

Jonas MollLeave a comment

In my previous three blog posts I have written about my research on 1) eHealth services for patients, 2) accessible digital collaborative learning environments and 3) teaching in higher education. This blog post collects the publications I have worked on in these areas during the last two years. Most of the articles are published with the open access option, meaning that you can read the entire articles by following the links in the lists below.

eHealth services for patients

Most of the publications from my first two years at Örebro University have focused on eHealth services for patients. The patient accessible electronic health record solution in Sweden, Journalen, has been the primary focus. These are the published journal articles that I have worked with in this area:

  • Huvila, I., Cajander, Å., Moll, J., Enwald, H., Eriksson-Backa, K., and Rexhepi, H. (2021). Technological and informational frames: explaining age-related variation in the use of patient accessible electronic health records as technology and information. Information Technology & People. DOI: 10.1108/ITP-08-2020-0566. [Link to open access publication]. This article is one of many articles that is based on a national patient survey where patients were asked questions about their attitudes towards and use of Journalen. See this blog post for more info on this publication.
  • Moll, J., and Cajander, Å. (2020). Oncology health-care professionals’ perceived effects of patient accessible electronic health records 6 years after launch: A survey study at a major university hospital in Sweden. Health Informatics Journal (Vol 26, No 2). pp: 1392-1403. [Link to open access publication]. This article was also based on a survey, but this time around the respondents were physicians and nurses with a specialization in oncology. See this blog post for more info on this publication.
  • Nurgalieva, L., Cajander, Å., Moll, J., Åhlfeldt, R-M., Huvila, I., and Marchese, M. (2020). ‘I do not share it with others. No, it’s for me, it’s my care’: On sharing of patient accessible electronic health records. Health Informatics Journal. DOI: 10.1177/1460458220912559. [Link to open access publication]. This article was also based on the national patient survey, as well as interviews with cancer patients. I realize now that I never wrote any blog post about this specific publication. I will write such a post later on during this autumn.
  • Rexhepi, H., Moll, J., and Huvila, I. (2020). Online electronic healthcare records: Comparing the views of cancer patients and others. Health Informatics Journal. DOI: 1460458220944727. [Link to open access publication]. In this article, which was also based on results from the national patient survey, we looked specifically at differences between answers from cancer patients and the other respondents. See this blog post for more info on this publication.

The following conference papers were also produced during the period:

  • Moll, J., and Cajander, Å. (2020). On Patient Accessible Electronic Health Records and the Experienced Effect on the Work Environment of Nurses. Studies in Health Technology and Inforamtics (Vol. 270). pp. 1021-1025. [Link to open access publication]. This paper is based on preliminary results from a large interview study with oncology healthcare professionals. I have not written any blog post about this publication, but I will do that later on this autumn.
  • Moll, J., and Rexhepi, H. (2020). The Effect of Patient Accessible Electronic Health Records on Communication and Involvement in Care-A National Patient Survey in Sweden. Studies in Health Technology and Informatics (Vol. 270). pp. 1056-1060. [Link to open access publication]. This paper is also based on the results from the national patient survey. Even in this case, I will write a separate blog post later during the autumn.
  • Rexhepi, H., Moll, J., Huvila, I., and Åhlfeldt, RM. (2020). Do you want to receive bad news through your patient accessible electronic health record? A national survey on receiving bad news in an era of digital health. Proceedings of the Eighteenth International Symposium for Health Information Management Research (Kalmar, Sweden, September 17-18). pp. 169-178. This one is also based on results from the national patient survey and was among the highest rated papers after the review rounds. As a result, we were provided the possibility to get our contribution published in a special issue of Health Informatics Journal. I will write a separate blog post about that article, which was published last week.

Accessible digital collaborative learning environments

This heading is listed here mostly for completeness. The Vinnova project I have written about many times before has led to many interesting ideas for publications, and work has started on some of them. We are still on the manuscript stages, so none of these have been published yet. An article based on a project from my last year at the Royal Institute of Technology was however published during autumn 2019 (no learning environment in focus, but combinations of visual, haptic and audio feedback still played important roles):

  • Frid, E., Moll, J., Bresin, R., & Pysander, E. L. S. (2019). Haptic feedback combined with movement sonification using a friction sound improves task performance in a virtual throwing task. Journal on Multimodal User Interfaces, 13(4), 279-290. [Link to open access publication].

Teaching in higher education

I still don’t have any journal articles related to this area, but I do have some conference papers. Quite a few journal articles related to this area of research are however planned for the second half of my assistant professorship. Some of the conference contributions were published during these last two years:

  • Moll, J., and Josefsson, P. (2020). Communication patterns among students and teachers when using Facebook in a university course. Proceedings of the 14th annual International Technology, Education and Development Conference (INTED 2020) (Valencia, Spain, March 2020). This full paper is based on an analysis of the interaction among students and between students and teachers in a teacher-administrated Facebook group that I used in my course in interaction design at Uppsala University. See this blog post for more info on this publication.
  • Wistrand, K., Moll, J., Hatakka, M. and Andersson, A. (2020). Improving Writing Skills Among Information Systems Students: Guidelines for Incorporating Communication Components in Higher Education. Proceedings of the 2020 IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference (FIE 2020), (Uppsala, Sweden, October 21-24), IEEE. This full paper is based on an analysis of two different ways of introducing scientific writing components in higher education. This one will also get a dedicated blog post during the autumn.
Academic writing · communication · Distance work · Pedagogical development · Pedagogy · Teaching

Looking back at the first two years of research at Örebro University, part 3: teaching in higher education

Jonas Moll1 Comment

This is the last one of my research posts in my blog series about the first half of my assistant professorship at Örebro University. This post focuses on pedagogical research and the earlier ones were about my research on eHealth services for patients and accessible digital collaborative learning environments, respectively. My next blog post will focus on publications from the last two years.

I have always been interested in conducting research based on my own teaching experiences – it forces me to reflect thoroughly on how I conduct my teaching, and it also enables me to make theoretically grounded improvements to my teaching. I have mainly conducted pedagogical research within three different areas during my time at Örebro University:

  • Scientific writing in higher education
  • Virtual teams in interaction design
  • The effects of the Covid-19 on teaching

Scientific writing in higher education

Before I started to work at Örebro University, I led a communication course for first year computer science students at the Royal Institute of Technology for several years. One of the main aims of the course was to improve the students’ writing skills especially when it comes to scientific writing. The dedicated communication course was meant to prepare the students for upcoming writing tasks and especially the bachelor and master thesis reports. The main reason for developing the course in the first place was that the quality of the students’ writing was generally low and the students were never really taught how to write scientifically sound reports and essays. Giving a communication course in the beginning of the study program is not the only solution to this kind of problem, it is also possible to incorporate writing instruction and increasingly complex tasks in already existing courses. This solution, also commonly called Writing Across the Curriculum, was implemented at my current department at Örebro University just before I started working here. After realizing that we had two different solutions to a very similar problem – we need to find means of helping our students to be better writers – I started up a new research collaboration with my colleagues Kai Wistrand, Annika Andersson and Mathias Hatakka who were very much involved in the WAC initiative at Örebro University. We used constructive alignment and curriculum theory to compare our two different cases (dedicated course and WAC) and developed a set of guidelines that other universities can get inspiration from. I will link to the resulting conference paper in my next blog post, which collects all publications that I have worked on during these last two years.

During spring 2021, I continued working with Kai in this area. We are now conducting a literature review where we, among other things, look deeper into theoretical concepts related to scientific writing (like e.g. critical thinking and lifelong learning) and models for pedagogical development in the area. It is super interesting to delve into this area and I have already learned a lot. Empirical material from e.g. interviews and texts will also be collected further on. One of the main aims of this research is to increase our understanding of what factors that contribute to high proficiency in scientific writing in higher education. The work will of course lead to scientific publications in the area, but hopefully also to concrete pedagogical development initiatives. I will of course write more about this interesting research when we have reached further in the process.

Virtual teams in interaction design

Yet another pedagogical research initiative was initiated during spring 2021. This time the research is mainly based on experiences from a course in interaction design that I have held online the last two spring terms. The course’s examiner Ann-Sofie Hellberg and I are investigating, among other things, how virtual teams can be used to successfully implement online versions of project based courses in which communication and collaboration in student groups are key components. We are currently analyzing a large sample of scientific articles that were gathered during an initial literature review. The material will be used as a theoretical ground for future publications in the area. I will get back to this when we have some clear results.

The idea to start studying virtual teams in depth actually came from a popular science book chapter that Ann-Sofie and I wrote last year. The book chapter was partly based on results from a survey that we handed out to students that took the 2020 version of the interaction design course, and we used the concept of virtual teams as a theoretical base when discussing own experiences from the course and the results from the survey. I will write more about the survey and the book chapter later on.

The effects of the Covid-19 pandemic on teaching

During spring 2020 I took the lead on a department-wide initiative to study the effects of the Covid-19 pandemic on our teaching at all levels. We collected several proposals for possible research angles regarding for example examinations and online seminars. Some articles, and even book chapters, have already been written and published and soon work will commence on journal articles looking back at the whole period of distance education from different angles. I’m really looking forward to our continued work in this area!