Structuring medication related activities for information management.

Medication treatment and the related information management are central parts of a patient's health care. As a cross-organizational and cooperative process, medication information management is a complex domain for development activities. We studied medication activities and related information management in a regional project in order to produce a shared broad picture of its processes and to understand the main issues and the needs for improvement. In this paper we provide a summary of the findings in a structured form, based on a six-dimensioned framework for design and analysis of activities and processes.

Medication information management: capturing multiprofessional perspective.

Medication information management (MIM) is a crucial activity for good quality of medication, but unfortunately not without problems. In order to improve medication information management the core activity of medication as a cooperative activity is to be studied as a whole, and the multiprofessional viewpoint for the improvement needs must be captured. In this paper we present our approach to gain such shared understanding, based on our regional development project experiences in Northern Savonia, Finland. The central features of the approach include thematic interviews supported by activity-driven models and a workshop with professionally mixed groups. Participants agreed strongly on the usefulness of the approach.

Improving the coordination of patients' medication management: a regional Finnish development project.

In this paper, we present an overview of activities and results from a regional development project in Finland. The aim in this project was to analyze how healthcare providers produce and receive information on a patient's medication, and to identify opportunities to improve the quality, effectiveness, availability and collaboration of social and healthcare services in relation to medication information. The project focused on the most important points in patients' medication management such as home care and care transitions. In a regional development project, data was gathered by interviews and a multi professional workshop. The study revealed that medication information reached only some professionals and lay caregivers despite electronic patient record (EPR) systems and tools. Differences in work processes related to medication reconciliation and information management were discussed in the group meeting and were regarded as a considerable risk for patient safety.

How to co-develop services, work, and information systems in healthcare: the daisy approach.

Information systems in healthcare need to be designed and developed in a collaborative way. However, existing collaborative methodologies for the parallel development of healthcare work and information systems are vague and fragmented. Furthermore, they neither address people-centred healthcare nor limited-resource contexts. In this paper we introduce an emerging holistic approach, based on a unifying theoretical basis, for co-developing the services, work and information systems in healthcare. The approach intends to (a) be collaborative in nature; (b) address the domains of both healthcare professionals and ordinary people / communities; (c) span the main analysis and design tasks of socio-technical information systems development from needs assessment through requirements setting to functional-architectural solutions; (d) be contextually sensitive; and (e) be practicable in "real life" beyond research settings.

Assessing the role of a site visit in adopting activity driven methods.

Healthcare activities rely heavily on socio-technical information systems. Such systems should be developed according to a socio-technical approach. The Activity Driven (AD) approach has been developed to contribute to the early phases of information system development in healthcare. Multi-professional and multi-disciplinary education in teams has been used to introduce the approach to prospective analysts, including "lay" healthcare professionals. 'Almost real life cases' have been emphasized as promoters of learning. This paper reports on a study on site visits as a crucial element for adopting socio-technical methods of analysis in healthcare. The paper presents feedback collected from an intensive course on health information systems development held in Mozambique. The results indicate the high importance of site visits - not only as a starting point of system analysis but also as a crucial promoter to learning socio-technical methods. Based on the results, needs for improvements are identified to the usability of AD tools and to the practical arrangements of site visits.

Analysis model for personal eHealth solutions and services.

In this paper, we present a framework for analysing and assessing various features of personal wellbeing information management services and solutions such as personal health records and citizen-oriented eHealth services. The model is based on general functional and interoperability standards for personal health management applications and generic frameworks for different aspects of analysis. It has been developed and used in the MyWellbeing project in Finland to provide baseline for the research, development and comparison of many different personal wellbeing and health management solutions and to support the development of unified "Coper" concept for citizen empowerment.