Högskolan i Skövde

In this workshop, examples and experiences from ongoing work todevelop and implement eHealth services for citizens will be provided. Challengesand potential solutions based on different international contexts will be discussedin interactive sessions. The results will form a report suggesting strategies andactivities that could provide potential solutions to the identified challenges.

Information and Communication Technology for health and wellbeing ('eHealth') is becoming increasingly important to deliver top-quality care to European citizens. There are a number of currently ongoing national and international efforts related to public access to eHealth services. In Sweden, the action research project DOME (Deployment of Online Medical Records and eHealth Services) aims to study and contribute to ongoing national deployment projects. This paper presents the DOME project's objectives, goals and methods as well as expected results regarding the national deployment of online medical records.

Many healthcare organizations are currently committed to organizational change and quality improvement projects. Unfortunately, little effort is put into health information system development according to usability requirements and methodology, leading to bottlenecks in the eHealth systems when implemented into daily practice. This paper presents a national initiative to build usability of eHealth systems into the Swedish national eHealth strategy and its action plan to ensure impact on practice. Action researchers within the health informatics domain collaborated with representatives of different care professions to propose high-priority changes necessary to improve the usability of health information systems.

Many healthcare organizations are currently committed to organizational change and quality improvement projects. Unfortunately, little effort is put into health information system development according to usability requirements and methodology, leading to bottlenecks in the eHealth systems when implemented into daily practice. This paper presents the experiences of applying a participatory approach in a nation-wide project. The aim of this national initiative was to build usability of eHealth systems into the Swedish national eHealth strategy and its action plan to ensure impact on practice. Action researchers within the health informatics domain collaborated with representatives of different care professions to propose high-priority changes necessary to improve the usability of health information systems. Reflections from the first phase of this initiative are further explored in terms of methodological challenges and recommendations, whereof one recommendation is to increase the use of HI-U specialists – health informaticians with usability and human work interaction design expertise within national and local eHealth development.

Many new public eHealth Services are now being developed. Often a conventional customer-vendor process is used, where the customer is a public authority, e.g. a county council, and the vendor a commercial actor, e.g. an IT development company. In this case study the engineering process regards a novel eHealth service aiming to provide patients with online access to their electronic health record. A complicating factor in conventional customer-vendor processes for public e-services is that "the future user could be anyone". In the light of best practice in Human-Computer Interaction, this study examines the joint effort of the customer and vendor when developing novel services for citizen use. The results include delimiting factors, recommendations for public authority customers and proposed new actions for the research agenda.

It is crucial to involve the patient in the development of patient accessible eHealth systems. But who, how and when? Patient involvement in development of e-health services for citizens has gained little attention to date. It is important to highlight the experiences, pros and cons, and explore new issues and future challenges that arise for all different stakeholders involved in e-health development.

One source of inspiration for this workshop is the European funded SUSTAINS project which aims to deploy e-health services with the patient as an important actor. Another is the Swedish research project My Care Pathways where focus is on development of new e-health services that enable the patient to follow and interact with their care processes.

This workshop aims to discuss the experiences made in ongoing European deployment projects of online e-health services as well as methods to improve patient participation in such development based on current evaluations and future needs.

The objective is to collect and disseminate various experiences from novel e-health service deployment in Europe; during the workshop active participation is desired via twitter and other eLearning tools, and afterwards the results of the workshop are published on easily accessible web sites.