Abstract
The 15th International Symposium for Health Information Management Research (ISHIMR) was organized jointly by University Hospital Zurich (Switzerland), the University of St Gallen (St Gallen, Switzerland) and the University of Sheffield (Sheffield, UK). Participants included researchers, healthcare professionals, health service managers and planners. The aim of the ISHIMR series of conferences is to bring together researchers and practitioners to disseminate, share and discuss research into how information and communication technologies can improve the management of information with the health sector.
Research in health information management, and the related areas of medical informatics, health informatics and e-Health, helps us to understand how information, and information and communication technologies can be used to improve the quality of care and the overall wellbeing of individuals, groups of patients and populations Citation[1]. The advent of Web 2.0/3.0 technologies, and the development of electronic clinical records, telehealth and telecare, in addition to health applications for mobile devices, have revolutionized the way information is created, stored, accessed and used within healthcare. Understanding these changes and how they benefit patients and the public, healthcare professionals, health service managers, planners of health services and policy-makers, is an important area of research. The International Symposium for Health Information Management Research (ISHIMR) conference series provides an opportunity to share research and developments in this area. The ISHIMR 2011 conference attracted presentations and participants from Europe, the Middle East and North America.
Conference proceedings
Peter Bath, convener of the ISHIMR series, opened the conference, and Rita Ziegler (CEO at the University Hospital Zurich, Switzerland) welcomed everyone during a very interesting talk on how the principles of the Hippocratic Oath related to digital health. Rubin Minhas (British Medical Journal Publishing Group, London, UK) opened the scientific program and discussed how health information is becoming more available and how evidence-based information can support e-Health, innovation and quality. Edouard Battegay (University Hospital Zurich, Switzerland)then gave a keynote speech on how multimorbidity presents a challenge within medicine and for e-Health. The conference was divided into parallel sessions covering a range of areas, including Pharmacy Informatics; Clinical Informatics, Consumer Health Informatics, Information Needs and Behaviours, e-Health, Data Mining, Evidence-Based Health Information and Health Information Management.
The Pharmacy Informatics session commenced with Catherine Holtgräfe and Joachim Zentes (Saarland University, Saarbrücken, Germany) describing their study into the critical determinants of internet use for information seeking regarding nonprescription drugs Citation[2]. These determinants included the accessibility of professional information, trust in health professionals’ opinions, the ability to search online and the perceived usefulness and credibility of online nonprescription drug information. The authors reported that using the internet as a source of information on nonprescription drugs negatively affects the use of stationary pharmacies. Sten-Erik Öhlund et al. (Linnaeus University, Kalmar, Sweden) examined the problem of interoperability issues in electronic prescribing, by analyzing a sample of over 1.2 million consecutive electronic prescriptions made during a 1-month period in Sweden during 2008. Interoperability problems were classified according to the message format specifications and prescription rules Citation[3]. Over 98% of the prescriptions had at least one prescription rule error and the mean number of errors per prescription was 4.8. These values were much higher than expected and the authors suggested that the pharmacy software systems had become fault tolerant to accommodate or compensate for errors. They concluded that there is a need to focus on resolving interoperability problems and to improve communication and cooperation among stakeholders. Ali Buabbas and Hamza Al-Shawaf (Brunel University, London, UK, and Kuwait University, Kuwait) reported that their study evaluating the impact of primary care information systems on pharmacy practice Citation[4]. They showed that the drug information provided by the system and its functionality, such as the decision-support systems, was insufficient and concluded that messaging alerts for drug–drug interactions should be improved to reduce medication errors.
The Clinical Informatics sessions described systems to improve efficiency and effectiveness within clinical care. Hannah Williamson et al. (University of Nottingham, UK) presented a study that evaluated a patient data management system used in intensive care Citation[5]. They identified improvements in communication, patient care, infection control and patient safety in relation to drug administration due to simplification of charting and the legibility of charts and medication lists. Miloš Suchy et al. (National Reference Center, Prague, Czech Republic) described innovations in the healthcare system in the joint development of indicator sets for clinical practice guidelines and quality indicators Citation[6]. They illustrated the positive effects of clinical practice guideline implementation in cancer clinical practice, including the centralization of oncology care, new treatment technologies, and drug regimens. These developments are important for improving quality of care based on innovation and the creation of a systematic basis of clinical intelligence.
Konstantinos Danas (Kingston University, London, UK) presented his work on errors in current Computerised Physician Order Entry (CPOE) systems Citation[7]. He proposed a multimethod systems analysis design model that seeks to eliminate problems by examining social aspects of the care team, their data needs, system interoperability, information quality and usability issues. The prescribing process in hospitals is directed by human activities with decisions made by clinical specialists. The process involves embedding soft-systems methodology to expose problematic soft aspects of the prescribing system, followed by a hard approach, focusing on the analysis of the system processes and data requirements. Catherine Todd et al. (University of Wollongong, Dubai, United Arab Emirates) reported the development of software to improve overall healthcare services, improve patient follow-up visits and determine the prevalence of neonatal hearing impairments within the United Arab Emirates, including regional patient risk factors Citation[8]. Helge Petersson et al. (Linnaeus University, Kalmar, Sweden) assessed a bronchoscopy virtual-reality simulator in medical students and residents Citation[9]. An impressive 95% of the participants were satisfied with the overall assessment of the simulator and felt that it should be included in their basic training programs.
The ‘Knowledge Strategies’ session included two papers reporting developments in automatic indexing techniques for biomedical literature; one from a user/medical indexers’ perspective Citation[10], and one presented from a computing/developers’ perspective Citation[11]. Both papers discussed the potential efficiencies in this specialist area of information retrieval for expert biomedical researchers. Thomas Poulter et al. (Clatterbridge Centre for Oncology and University of Sheffield, UK) then presented Comprehensive, Integrated, Customised Electronic Records for Oncology (CICERO), a socio-technical model to support research in health informatics, and described the implementation of an oncology-specific electronic patient record system Citation[12].
The adoption of information technology (IT) in healthcare organizations and the design and evaluation of innovative sociotechnical systems enhancing the whole chain of healthcare were focus of the sessions on Health Information Systems (HIS) and e-Health. In their position paper, Tobias Mettler and Dimitri Raptis (University of St Gallen and University Hospital Zurich, Switzerland) discussed the research domain of HIS and identified three major research fields: e-Health and clinical systems; personal health and independent living; and the intersection between these two areas Citation[13]. The succeeding papers presented different approaches that improved the dynamic support for distributed healthcare teams Citation[14] and illustrated how to deal with different standardization practices Citation[15].
Panagiotis Ketikidis et al. (City College, Thessaloniki, Greece, and University of Sheffield, UK) described their survey in Skopje, Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, on the acceptance of IT among health professionals using the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) to frame their study Citation[16]. No significant differences were found between doctors and nurses in the TAM-related variables. However, the perceived ease of use of IT directly predicted intention to use health IT, but perceived usefulness, relevance and subjective norms did not predict intention to use IT. The authors concluded that information campaigns to support IT in healthcare settings should focus on the ease of use of the systems, as well as the relevance to their work. A further paper reported the development of an open-source web-based, multicenter clinical trial management system to improve the high administrative burden, data-management pitfalls and high costs associated with such studies, at almost no additional cost Citation[17].
Impact of the conference
The conference was attended by researchers, healthcare professionals, service managers and planners, who were interested in how information management can improve healthcare. What makes the ISHIMR conferences successful is that they are relatively small and very friendly: there is the opportunity for both new and experienced researchers and practitioners to present their work to an interested audience, and to discuss the implications of their findings during the chaired sessions and the conference breaks. The chaired poster session enables poster presenters to speak for 2 min about their work and gain feedback. All papers and poster abstracts are peer reviewed by at least two members of the Programme Committee, and the accepted papers and poster abstracts are published in the Conference Proceedings. The papers rated highest from peer review are selected for further publication in a special issue of Health Informatics Journal. In the closing session, Peter Bath announced that further selected papers would be published in a new open-access journal, International Journal for Health Information Management Research (IJHIMR), to be launched in 2012.
Next conference
The 16th ISHIMR will be held in 2013. For further details, please contact the ISHIMR convener, Peter Bath, using the details on the first page of this article.
Financial & competing interests disclosure
The authors have no relevant affiliations or financial involvement with any organization or entity with a financial interest in or financial conflict with the subject matter or materials discussed in the manuscript. This includes employment, consultancies, honoraria, stock ownership or options, expert testimony, grants or patents received or pending, or royalties.
No writing assistance was utilized in the production of this manuscript.
References
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- Raptis DA, Mettler T, Schadde E et al. Development of a novel open source web-based multi-centre clinical trial management system. In: Proceedings of the Fifteenth International Symposium for Health Information Management Research. Bath PA, Mettler T, Raptis DA, Sen BA (Eds). University of Zurich, Switzerland, 449–457 (2011).