Education in Biomedical and Health Informatics: A European Perspective.

In higher education, programs in specialization in Health Informatics, Medical Informatics, Health Engineering are continuously growing. In this research, almost 1800 universities and colleges were checked in order to find related educational programs at all academic levels. Approximately 1000 academic leading degree programs in those domains have already been identified. The detailed records of the related educational programs will help to understand the current educational needs and priorities. Although, the growth of the related educational programs is not the same in each country.

Taking Nursing Informatics into the Future.

The new board EFMIs Working Group have has planned the future strategy for involving nurses in informatics. The strategy is to bring nursing informatics into the future. It is important to ensure that the next generation of nurses is involved in the work with Nursing Informatics and share knowledge. It must be done with a targeted effort including of social media and a more offensive effort at the annual MIE meetings.

Developing a Framework for Teaching Nursing Informatics Internationally.

Information technology systems in healthcare have resulted in transformation of work practices. Nurses need knowledge, skills, judgment and understanding of the importance of informatics from the commencement of their training. This interactive workshop will look at developing a framework for common core content, teaching methodologies and program structures in the integration of nursing informatics in undergraduate programs. The workshop format will provide a forum for international discussion on this serious challenge faced by nursing schools everywhere. The outcome of this workshop will be the development of a framework that may be applied in teaching nursing informatics internationally.

Current Status for Teaching Nursing Informatics in Denmark, Canada, and Australia.

Nursing schools in Denmark, Canada, and Australia are all currently involved in integrating nursing informatics in the nursing bachelor programme. This paper gives a brief update on the current situation of nursing informatics education for bachelor level nurses in each of the three countries. Whilst there are differences in the curriculum in each county, it is important to share knowledge about undergraduate nursing informatics worldwide to ensure consistency.

Teaching Nursing Informatics in Australia, Canada and Denmark.

Whilst there is a strong interest in nursing informatics in the graduate nurse population, nursing informatics has been slow to be incorporated into the undergraduate nursing curriculum. Nursing schools in Australia, Canada, and Denmark are all currently involved in redeveloping their curricula to include nursing informatics in a meaningful way. This paper provides a brief historical description of the uptake of nursing informatics in each of the three countries and discusses the required future directions and strategies towards incorporating nursing informatics into the undergraduate curriculum.

Development of methods for usability evaluations of EHR systems.

Developing electronic health record (EHR) systems in Denmark is an on going, iterative process, where also a maturation process for clinical use should be considered. Convincing methodology for collecting and incorporating in the soft- and hardware knowledge and robustness for the clinical environments is not on hand. A way to involve the clinicians in the development process is conducting usability evaluations. The complexity of the clinical use of the systems is difficult to transmit to a usability laboratory, and due to ethical issues a traditional field study can be impossible to carry out. The aim of this study has been to investigate how it is possible to identify usability problems in an EHR system by combining methods from laboratory tests and field studies. The methods selected for the test design are: the think aloud method, video and screen recording, debriefing, a scenario based on an authentic patient record, and testing on the normal production system. The reliability and validity of the results is increased due to the application of method- and data-triangulation. The results of the usability evaluation include problems in the categories: system response time, GUI-design, functionality, procedures, and error messages. The problems were classified as cosmetic, severe, or critical according to a rating scale. The experience with each method is discussed. It is concluded that combining methods from laboratory test and field study makes it possible to identify usability problems. There are indications that some of the usability problems only occurred due to the establishment of an authentic scenario.

Participatory Work Flow Analysis prior to Implementation of EPR: A Method to Discover Needs for Change.

We need to know how clinicians' use their paper based medical records to secure a local participation in the implementation process of Electronic Patient Record (EPR). In what way their use of paper based medical records is related to, or dependent on, other people and artifacts. The research presented in this paper was done as part of a work flow analysis of the particular sequence of doing rounds at two distinct hospital departments, a thoracic surgical and a cardiology department. It was designed to develop a method that would let the hospital clinicians obtain knowledge on the daily use of the paper based medical records during rounds and thus make use of their local knowledge to start a discussion on changes in organization and knowledge before EPR can be successfully implemented.We are grateful to the following clinicians, Cathrine H. Foss, MD. Pauline Schrødder, MD. Morten Smerup MD and Niels Henrik Stålsen, MD and the medical director Børge H. Jensen, MD, Skejby Sygehus, Aarhus University Hospital for sharing their knowledge with us.The aim was to investigate how paper based medical records are currently used at two wards.

[IT systems for clinical databases--status and perspectives]. / It-systemer til kliniske kvalitetsdatabaser--status og perspektiver.

Generally, the use of clinical databases for quality development in the hospital sector has not been satisfactory. A substantial problem attaches to the IT systems used hitherto. This article describes a number of requirements which the National Indicator Project has specified for a forthcoming second generation of clinical database system. Besides, the second generation system Clinical Performance Measurements which is used in the Copenhagen Hospital Corporation for several disease areas and for The Danish Vascular Registry is described. This experience emphasizes the need for central management of development initiatives within clinical quality databases. The management must allow for coordination, rational management and experience-based further development of IT systems for the clinical databases and integration with present and forthcoming systems including electronic patient record systems. The management should also allow for the decisive interaction between clinical quality development and medical informatics.