Heidi Gilstad

Nordic eHealth Indicators: Organisation of research, first results and plan for the future.

eHealth indicator and benchmarking activities are rapidly increasing nationally and internationally. The work is rarely based on a transparent methodology for indicator definition. This article describes first results of testing an indicator methodology for defining eHealth indicators, which was reported at the Medical Informatics Europe conference in 2012. The core elements of the methodology are illustrated, demonstrating validation of each of them in the context of Nordic eHealth Indicator work. Validation proved the importance of conducting each of the steps of the methodology, with several scientific as well as practical outcomes. The article is based on a report to be published by the Nordic Council of Ministers [4].

eHealth Literacy Research – Quo vadis?

ABSTRACT The concept of electronic health (eHealth) literacy evolved from the social and information sciences and describes competencies necessary to use electronic health services. As it is a rather new topic, and as there is no current overview of the state of the art in research, it is not possible to identify research gaps. Therefore, the objective of this viewpoint article is to increase knowledge on the current state of the art of research in eHealth literacy and to identify gaps in scientific research which should be focused on by the research community in the future. The article provides a current viewpoint of the concept of eHealth literacy and related research. Gaps can be found in terms of a missing “gold standard” regarding both the definition and the measurement of eHealth literacy. Furthermore, there is a need for identifying the implications on eHealth developers, which evolve from the measurement of eHealth literacy in eHealth users. Finally, a stronger inclusion of health professionals, both in the evolving concept and in the measurement of eHealth literacy, is needed in the future.

Nordic eHealth benchmarking

The report presents results of the Nordic eHealth Research Network, a subgroup of the eNordic Council of Ministers Health group. The network defined and collected data for altogether 49 common eHea ...

Monitoring the Amount of Practical Use of eHealth on National Level by Use of Log Data: Lessons Learned

This paper set out to define the lessons learned from the process of characterizing the amount of practical use of eHealth on national level by collecting and comparing log data harvested from national logs in the Nordic countries. The health systems of the Nordic countries are quite similar in structure and their eHealth strategies include similar elements, however when confronted with the specific context in the different systems it proved challenging to define a common set of indicators for monitoring the practical use of eHealth. A thorough analysis of context leading to the definitions of the indicators is the basis needed due to the complexity of the data in the national logs. A comprehensive knowledge of the structure that underlines these logs is of utmost importance when striving for collecting comparable data. Although challenging, the process of defining indicators for practical use of eHealth by data harvested trough national logs is not an impossible task, but a task that requires in depth discussions of definitions of indicators as well as a substantial insight into the architecture and content of the national databases. There is need for continuous work on these indicators to ensure their quality and thus make sure that the defined indicators can meaningfully inform eHealth policies.

Multinational surveys for monitoring eHealth policy implementations: usefulness and pitfalls

Development of multinational variables for monitoring eHealth policy implementations is a complex task and requires multidisciplinary, knowledge-based international collaboration. Experts in an interdisciplinary workshop identified useful data and pitfalls for comparative variable development. The results are presented and discussed in this paper.

Trust and provenance in communication to ehealth consumers

The future of medicine is shifting to a patient-centric model. One aspect of this model involves an increasing utility to triangulate health-related data. These data sources will be of variable quality and new ways of kitemarking and weighting the data is required. The exemplar of I-Choose may provide a framework for health-related searches with the end user providing the weighting of the criteria used in the search algorithms. NHS Grampian’s No Delays concept uses video on demand to provide clinician-made personalised patient postcards to the patient. This chapter explores trust and provenance issues arising from health care delivered via the Internet and how the end user engages with the technology rather than the wishful hope of “building it and they will use it”.

Citizens' Access to Their Digital Health Data in Eleven Countries - A Comparative Study

Governments around the world are actively promoting citizens electronic access to their health data as one of a number of ways to respond to the challenges of health care delivery in the 21st century. While numerous approaches have been utilized it is evident from cross-country comparisons that there are different conceptualizations of: both the expected and desired roles for citizens in the management of their own health; the benefits that will be delivered by citizen access and how these benefits should be measured and benchmarked over-time. This paper presents comparative analyses of the methods by which citizens are provided with access to their own health data across 11 countries. The paper aims to stimulate debate on electronic citizen access to health data and the challenges of measuring benefit as well as reflection on capacity of different citizens to engage with e-health.