Peter Karlsudd

E-Collaboration around children with functional disabilities

This paper describes the conceptual development and evaluation of an information technology (IT)-based cooperation system. The system, called CIDC, was developed at the University of Kalmar with the aim of facilitating communication, information, documentation, and collaboration concerning disabled children and their life situation. The study aims at finding out whether a system like this makes rehabilitation/habilitation work more effective. Previous experience shows that in conventional and non-IT-based communication, there are great deficiencies of cooperation between participants and the care, education, and welfare of a disabled child. We hypothesized that the system would improve the quality and overall implementation of efforts planned and carried out. The system has been tried in 8 families, all having a disabled child in the family. A group of 5-12 users in each so-called e-room have cooperated concerning the childs life situation. The result shows that the parents are very satisfied that the system facilitates their work in many respects. The professional caregivers have also experienced obvious advantages, whereas a few, despite the quality-raising cooperation, are afraid it will involve more work. Many of the functions that the system has made available have been viewed positively, but the degree of utilization does not reach the same high level as its estimated usefulness. When the system is controlled by the parents, communication activities and usefulness estimations are higher than when the professionals are responsible. The system has proved easy to implement and has on the whole been felt to be user friendly. The experiment has been generally successful and will continue to be developed in cooperation with parent associations, enabling children with various disabilities to join.

Net-Based Training for Physicians:

In order to ensure and increase access to high-quality learning opportunities it is becoming more and more common to integrate e-learning into health-related environments. The rapid development of these new learning environments also requires continuous monitoring and evaluation, to guarantee the quality of the health-care education. In this project a holistic model based on a systems approach is used in order to evaluate a video conference-supported course in emergency medicine. Questionnaires and observations as well as interviews in groups and individually were used for data gathering. The course participants were 27 junior doctors, 18 from the Stockholm node and 9 from the Kalmar node; 11 lecturers were involved. The collaborative pedagogical approach was appreciated; all participants agreed that their peers contributed to the learning process. The greatest advantage of the course was that high-quality education was made available to a group of junior doctors who did not have alternative possibilities for participating in a traditional course. To offer a proficient video conference environment for synchronous two-way communication, the course must be developed at three levels: technical environment; individual information and communications technology skills; and course organisation. Potential users must be offered adequate training and technical support. The course organisation must encourage the sharing of responsibilities and tasks between the participating nodes.

Family interaction and consensus with IT support

Experience shows that there are great defects in information and collaboration between families and professionals in the health and care sector. In an attempt to improve the quality of the efforts planned and implemented in collaboration with relatives a family-related IT-based collaboration system called CIDC was constructed. With the intention to facilitate communication, information, documentation, and collaboration the system was tested together with parents of children with cognitive impairment. The system contains a number of functions gathered in a so-called e-collaboration room. The person administering and distributing the system authorizes the patient/care recipient or relative to build up an e-collaboration room. The result has been largely positive, but the part, which was supposed to document everyday activities, leaves much to be desired. For this reason a follow-up study was completed, and an iPad was used as a contact book, which with the help of the Dropbox software provided increased insight into the child and improved the contact with parents without losing confidentiality or causing extra workload for the staff. By automatic download from the iPad parents and/or contact persons could easily follow the documentation of childrens everyday activities.