Together with Karolinska Institutet we have got a paper accepted for Medinfo’2010! In the paper we outline a framework that can aid in identifying problems in health care processes. The framework can be used for improving current care processes, as well as for the design of supporting e-health solutions. The paper contains a case study from the Vippa project.
Authors: Maria Hägglund, Martin Henkel, Jelena Zdravkovic, Paul Johannesson, Inger Rising, Ingvar Krakau and Sabine Koch
Abstract:
The development of efficient e-services for patient-centered healthcare requires insight into concrete problems in administrative and clinical work processes as well as an understanding of the strategic goals that should guide these healthcare processes. However, considering both concrete process-related problems and high-level strategic goals during process analysis and solution design can be problematic. To address this, we propose a
structured approach for analyzing both high- and low-level goals in a healthcare process and relating these to identified problems. Thereby proposed solutions for each problem in form of, e.g. e-services can be connected to
strategic goals. The approach consists of five steps; process modeling; process-based problem identification and classification; process goal identification; mapping to strategic goals; and solution proposal. The approach
is illustrated by examples from a case study of Swedish stroke care. In conclusion, the approach enables analysis of high- and low-level goals in a healthcare process by relating these to identified problems. The results thereof form a basis for redefinition of current care processes, as well as for design of supporting e-health solutions.
This week we submitted a paper titled “Business Process Management for Open E-services in Local Government” to the BPM track in the Australian Conference on Information Systems. The paper describes the prototype which we developed for the Open Social Services (ÖST) project. More generally it discusses the use of business process technology for the development of e-services. A preprint of the paper can be found here.
The work was carried out in cooperation with Dr. David Truffet from Australia and Gustaf Juell-Skielse (DSV). I met David during my visit at QUT last summer, which coincided with his own visit there. Similarly to me, David believes in the YAWL open-source initiative carried out by the BPM group at QUT and invests (among other through the establishment of a consulting company for YAWL) on spreading out the research results and YAWL to industry and official sector.
Hercules Dalianis, Martin Hassel and Sumithra Velupillai organized the Louhi 2010, Second Louhi Workshop on Text and Data Mining of Health Documuntes. Maria Skeppstedt also from our group presented her paper Negation Detection in Swedish Clinical Text. We presented also a joint paper with the HEXAnord research network. Eduard Hovy from USC/ISI held an excellent invited talk with the title Creating Training Material for Health Informatics: Toward a Science of Annotation for over 30 attendants.
The Louhi 2010 workshop was a success with submissions from eleven countries and three continents. The presentations encompassed clinical texts in Swedish, Finnish, French and English. The main conference NAACL-HLT, the 11th Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics, had over 600 participants and 200 accepted papers.
I presented our paper about the IMAIL-project at the EGOV 2010 conference in Lausanne, Switzerland:
Knutsson, O, T. Cerratto Pargman, H. Dalianis, M. Rosell and E. Sneiders. 2010. Increasing the efficiency and quality of e-mail communication in egovernment using language technology. In the Proceedings of IFIP e-Government Conference 2010 (EGOV 2010), Lausanne, Switzerland, Trauner Druck, pp. 45-52. pdf
The project has actually developed a lot since we wrote the paper in February-March, but I presented the work carried until the deadline of EGOV. I got a feeling that several people thought it to be a very important project, and that governmental agencies really must deal with all their e-mails in more efficient ways. Hopefully we will return to EGOV next year and present all the research results from the IMAIL-project.
I was also happy that another paper written by another research team at DSV achieved one of the conference’s paper awards: Design of an Open Social E?Service for Assisted Living by Gustaf Juell?Skielse and Petia Wohed. Congratulations!
In June I graduated from
The Swedish language consultancy programme (Språkkonsultprogrammet). My bachelor thesis is a part of the research in the Hexanord-project. The thesis is written in Swedish and the title is
Patientjournalen som genre (Patient records: a genre analysis).
The topic of the thesis is the language in patient records. The aim was to examine how well the law (Patientdatalagen/Patient data act) corresponds with the reality, and what the writers, medical doctors, think about the law. My special interest was paragraph 13 that says “the patient records should be as easy as possible for the patient to read”.
I also examined if parts of the records might be hard to understand if you are neither a doctor nor a nurse. A textual analysis, based on Hallidays sociocultural theories about language and grammar, was the main method in thesis. As a complement, a questionnaire was sent to doctors at Karolinska sjukhuset(/The Karolinska University Hospital). 40 doctors answered.
The results showed that the records can be difficult at several levels. They contain a lot of technical terms and abbreviations that even doctors might find difficult. The records are written from the doctors’ perspective. There are almost no people mentioned in the records. There are very few names and pronouns.
A majority of the doctors had a positive view on the law. A third of the doctors didn’t know of the law, and they were more negative than the others. Some of the doctors were highly set against the law, and emphasized that the medical record is first and foremost a tool, used by doctors and nurses in the care process.
The questionnaire showed that the doctors primarily write the record for their colleagues, and that they don’t write for the patients.
Mid of this month, I participated in the Americas Conference on Information Systems (AMCIS-2010). Like the case of ECIS-2010, this year conference was also held outside traditional host i.e. USA and Canada. It took place in Lima, Peru. It was interesting to note that one of the seven wonders in the world today is in Peru i.e. Machu Picchu, a city in clouds (www.peru-machu-picchu.com). And there were organized trips after the conference if wanted to take the opportunity. The good news is that you can also take a virtual tour (http://www.peru-machu-picchu.com/map.php) and more interesting while there can also take tour to the rest of 7 wonders in the world. Also during the conference we were able to enjoy the typical culture of Peru in organized dinners as can see some photos far below! At the conference, I presented a paper written together with Lazar Rusu. The title of our paper is “IT Governance Maturity in the Public Sector Organizations in a Developing Country: The Case of Tanzania”. I also participated in one day CIO Symposium that was held along AMCIS-2010. In this symposium one of the three important themes addressed this year was IT governance. Shared below are some photos one of them being with the famous IT/Business alignment Prof. Luftman and another while contributing in some topics of the symposium.
In mid June this year, I participated in the European Conference on Information Systems (ECIS-2010). This time the conference was held in Pretoria, South Africa. It looks like was strategic as the 2010 FIFA World Cup started a day or so after we have finished the conference. Also we were able to enjoy Vuvuzela (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vuvuzela) as they started using them even before the games! At the conference, I presented a paper written together with Lazar Rusu. The title of our paper is “Critical Success Factors for effective IT governance in the public sector organisations in a developing country: The case of Tanzania”. Shared are some photos while presenting but also with Prof. Joey George, President of Association of Information Systems (AIS) after his key note speech and some talks with him… and few more pics.
A paper named “Organizational Culture Impact on Business-IT Alignment” written by Mohamed El Mekawy and me has been accepted for publication in the proceedings of Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS-44) publisher IEEE Computer Society (http://www.hicss.hawaii.edu/hicss_44/apahome44.htm). The Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS) is a top ranked conference and is ranked “A” according to The Australian Government’s Excellence in Research project (ERA) (http://lamp.infosys.deakin.edu.au/era/?page=cfordet&selfor=0806). Therefore we are very happy that our paper (that has received excellent reviews) has been accepted for publication in HICSS-44 conference proceedings. An abstract of our paper is following below.
Abstract.
Importance of Business-IT Alignment (BITA) has increased over the past few years. However, achieving and maturing BITA still has apparent difficulties. Therefore, research efforts resulted in a number of theoretical models that can be applied as supportive tools for assessing different components of BITA. Most of these efforts have been produced either in Anglo-Saxon Countries or based on their experiences. The purpose of this paper is to explore the impact of organizational culture on maturity of BITA. The paper relies on the nine dimensions of Project GLOBE to understand societal as well as organizational culture. It also relies on the bottom-up comprehensive approach of Luftman’s Strategic Alignment Maturity Model to understand organization’s alignment components. To fulfill the purpose of this study, a comparative analysis has been carried out between two subsidiaries of a multinational organization with a federal organizational structure that operates in Egypt and Sweden. The results shows that: a) is a difference in how different components of BITA are interpreted and implemented in different organizational culture, and b) that the impact of organizational culture on BITA maturity is more complex than what is expected especially on variables that require social interactions.
Hi!
I have been working full-time at DSV for a month now and would like to take the opportunity to introduce myself on the Syslab blog. I’m currently working on adapting the Web Mining course to a more distance-friendly form. I will also be involved in the research work of the “IT for Health” team, performing natural language processing on patient health records.
I have a BSc in computer science from RMIT in Melbourne, Australia and I just recently completed my Master’s degree from KTH and the EMIS program. In my thesis I explored the possibility of applying the automatic classification methods (corpus annotation and machine learning) used in the biomedical and clinical domain to that of knowledge management. More specifically, I wanted to find out whether it is possible to assess automatically the level of certainty in knowledge-intensive documents. Together with my supervisor, Sumithra Velupillai, the thesis was turned into a paper that was published and presented at a workshop (Negation and Speculation in Natural Language Processing) in Uppsala in July.
I look forward to getting to know you all more in the coming months!
Aron
Hello there!
Feeling very welcome at DSV, I have just entered the world of text annotation.
And what a wonderful world it is!
Drafted by Hercules, away from my job as a physician at the Blood Bank at Karolinska University Hospital where I was oscillating between the hospitals in Solna, Huddinge, Danderyd and SÖS, I now enjoy the more peaceful life in Kista. Here, there is time for academic discussions and afterthought. Pleasant!
I was recruited to the IT for Health-group as a domain specialist, being familiar with the language in patient health records since at least 25 years back. This coming semester I will work with Sumithra Velupillai och Maria Skeppstedt on negation and speculation detection projects.
I did my Ph.D. some 20 years ago in Medical Cellbiology at Karolinska Institutet. I always knew that I would return to the research world in one form or another, when the children grew old enough for me to focus on something else. But I had never dreamed about this nice collaboration across the sciences, a must to build meaningful tools for the health care workers.
I hope to contribute to computer science though I have not the least idea about how a computer functions.
Mia
