Department of Health and Social Management

In 2005, the Healthcare Information Management Systems Society (HIMSS) Nursing Informatics Community developed a survey to measure the impact of health information technology (HIT), the I-HIT Scale, on the role of nurses and interdisciplinary communication in hospital settings. In 2007, nursing informatics colleagues from Australia, England, Finland, Ireland, New Zealand, Scotland and the United States formed a research collaborative to validate the I-HIT across countries. All teams have completed construct and face validation in their countries. Five out of six teams have initiated reliability testing by practicing nurses. This paper reports the international collaborative's validation of the I-HIT Scale completed to date.

Aging of population is an inevitable process by which the number of elderly people is increasing. Rapid development of information and communication technology (ICT) is changing basic needs of elderly people; therefore society should ensure opportunities for elderly to learn and use ICT in a way to manage their daily life activities and in this way enable them participation in the information and knowledge society. The purpose of the study was to find out whether elderly are acquainted with the advanced technology and to what extent they use it or they desire to use it. Within the single point study we interviewed 100 randomly selected elderly people from different geographical regions in Slovenia. Results showed the differences in the use of advanced technology by Slovenian regions; therefore in the future activities should be focused on organizing promotional and demonstrational activities including ICT courses to increase elderly's motivation for ICT interaction.

Objectives: The use of IT in health care has merged advanced knowledge and skills for health care professionals. Former studies indicate that basic skills in computer use are no more than comprehensive competencies to manage electronically stored information in health care. ...

Tiivistelmä Sähköisen potilaskertomuksen valtakunnallinen käyttöönotto on ollut kansallisen terveyshankkeen keskeinen ta-voite. Tällä hetkellä sähköinen potilaskertomusjärjestelmä on jo käytössä suurimmalla osalla terveydenhuollon organisaatioita. Laki sosiaali-ja ...

Previous research has shown loneliness as a threat for the quality of life of older people; therefore the goal of the intervention in a quasi-experimental study was to evaluate and discuss the self-reported level of loneliness of older people in Finland and Slovenia before and after a computer intervention. Intervention in a quasi-experimental study was conducted among 58 older participants at the baseline (M = 72.4 years) and 45 older participants at the follow-up research study (M = 72.9 years). Inferential statistics showed a significant difference in the reduction of loneliness between the countries, and a decreased level of loneliness of older people after completing the computer training course. Although older people experience many age-related problems which may reduce their interest in learning information and communication technology (ICT) skills, it is important that they are computer-proficient, because computer engagement can reduce the level of loneliness of older people and in this way has a positive effect on their quality of life.

Objective. To identify the causes and contributing factors of adverse drug events (ADEs) from the information management point of view. Design. Retrospective study. Official register data were used to analyse preventable ADEs. The data were retrieved from the National Supervisory Authority for Welfare and Health and were analysed using qualitative content analysis, which was mainly based on the classification of ADEs. Setting. National health care system. Participants. Patient complaints (n ¼ 16) and official statements about causality of injuries or deaths (n ¼ 41) in which ADEs were present from the years 2001-07. A total of 57 statements were reviewed, and the 67 ADEs that occurred in the statements were analysed. Interventions. None. Main Outcome Measures. Causes, contributing factors, types of errors. Results. The majority of ADEs (81%) occurred in inpatients in general health care units (n ¼ 26), in specialized health care units (n ¼ 19) or in nursing homes (n ¼ 10). ADEs occurring in the prescription, transcription (n ¼ 23) and administration (n ¼ 21) stages were the most frequent, and human factors were the leading class of underlying cause followed by the use of data. Error types relating to information management (n ¼ 26) occurred in every phase of the medication use process. The majority of information management errors were related to documentation, copying data or contraindicated prescriptions, and they mainly occurred in the prescription and transcription (n ¼ 11), and admission phases (n ¼ 8). Conclusion. Information management processes need to be improved to improve medication safety.

This paper 1) presents the protocol of an ongoing systematic literature review on the methods of structuring Electronic Health Record (EHR) data and studying the impacts of implemented structures, thus laying basis for the analysis of the empirical articles 2) describes previous reviews published on the subject and retrieved during the search of bibliographic databases, and 3) presents a summary of the results of previous reviews. Methods Cochrane instructions were exploited to outline the review protocol-phases and search elements. Test searches were conducted to refine the search. The abstracts and/or full texts of review papers captured by the search were read by two of the team members independently, with disagreements first negotiated between them and if necessary eventually resolved in the team meetings. Additional review articles were picked from the reference lists of the reviews included in our search results. The elements defined in the search strategy and analytic framework were converted to a data extraction tool, which was tested by extracting data from the reviews captured by the search. Descriptive analysis of the extracted data was conducted. Results The 12-stage review protocol that we developed includes definition of the problem, the search strategy and search terms, testing the strategy, conducting the search, updating search from references found, removing duplicates, defining the inclusion and exclusion criteria, exclusion and inclusion of papers, definition of the analytic framework to extract data, extracting data and reporting results. Our searches in fifteen electronic bibliographic databases retrieved 27 reviews, of which 14 were included for full text analysis. Of these, 11 focused on medical and three on nursing record structures. The data structures included forms, ontologies, classifications and terminologies. Some evidence was found on data structure impact on information quality, process quality and efficiency, but not on patients or professionals. Conclusions The 12 step review protocol resulted in a variety of reviews of different ways to structure EHR data. None of them compared outcomes of different structuring methods; all had a narrower

Evidence-based practice requires flexible systems for information retrieval. Search processes in electronic databases must be based on terms, which are familiar to professionals and describe accurately the problem to be solved. The paper describes the process of evolving a controlled nursing vocabulary for indexing and information retrieval purposes. The vocabulary is based on terms of the Medline thesaurus the medical subject headings (MeSH) by National Library of Medicine and the International Classification for Nursing Practice by the International Council of Nurses. The created vocabulary consists of 10 themes central to nursing domain. The content was compiled using Delphi technique. The expert panel had four rounds and at the first stage the vocabulary consists of 558 terms. The validity of the vocabulary has been tested for indexing nursing research and based on the validation the expert panel has made some changes for the hierarchy and content. The vocabulary will be added as an independent theme to the Finnish thesaurus the FinMeSH.

Computer literacy in nursing: developing the information technology syllabus in nursing education This study has two main purposes: first, to identify and describe the computer skills required in nursing; and second, to find out what should be taught about information technology in nursing education. A three-round Delphi survey was carried out with a panel of experts representing nursing practice, nursing education, nurse students and consumers. The panel showed a consensus of opinion on 71% of the items included in the questionnaire designed for the study. The experts agreed that nurses must know how to use the computer for word-processing purposes, for accessing and using the hospital information system, and for emailing. Nurses must also be aware of system security and show a positive attitude towards computers. It is concluded that hospital information systems and nursing informatics should be integrated into laboratory and hospital training. In Finland, there has been continuing research since I NTRODUCTI ON 1987 to monitor and evaluate education in computer use. However, computer-assisted instruction and general edu-Computers were initially introduced in the Finnish health care system in the 1960s for administrative and research cational applications remain scarce. A further difficulty is that student nurses on hospital wards are usually denied purposes. Computers are now more powerful and more compact and are widely used in everyday patient care access to the hospital information system. This paper describes one component of a research pro-for the input, retrieval, manipulation and distribution of nursing data. ject that is concerned with improving and developing the teaching of nursing informatics. The specific concerns One of the concepts that came into being with the proliferation of computers was 'computer literacy', i.e. the here are the skills related to computer use in nursing and how information technology should be taught in basic ability to read and write with computers. Several studies have highlighted the importance of good computer literacy nursing education. The data were collected using the Delphi technique, which has not been previously used in in nursing (e.g. Grobe 1988a, Bryson 1991, Carty 1993). There are also programmes which aim to facilitate learning information technology studies in Finland. about information technology in health care (e.g. Romano & Heller 1990, McGonicle & Eggers 1991, Carter & LI TERATURE REVIEW Axford 1993). The literature on the use of information technology in health care comprises a number of studies on computer

Title. Evaluating nursing documentation-research designs and methods: systematic review. Aim. This paper is a report of a review conducted to assess the research methods applied in the evaluation of nursing documentation. Data sources.The material was drawn from three databases: CINAHL, PubMed and Cochrane using the keywords nursing documentation, nursing care plan, nursing record system, evaluation and assessment. The search was confined to relevant electronically-retrievable studies published in the English language from 2000 to 2007. This yielded 41 studies, including two reviews. Methods. Content analysis produced a classification into three themes: nursing documentation, patient-centred documentation and standardized documentation. Each study was assessed according to its research design, methodology, sample size and focus of data collection. In addition, the studies categorized under the heading of standardized documentation were assessed in terms of their outcomes. Results. Most of the studies (n = 19) focused on patient-centred documentation. Most (n = 20) were retrospective studies and used data collected from patient records (n = 35). An audit instrument was used to assess nursing documentation in almost all the studies. Studies classified under the heading of standardized documentation showed more positive than negative effects with respect to quality, the nursing process and terminology use, knowledge level and acceptance of computer use in documentation. Conclusion. The use of structured nursing terminology in electronic patient record systems will extend the scope of documentation research from assessing the quality of documentation to measuring patient outcomes. More data should also be collected from patients and family members when evaluating nursing documentation.

In this paper, we integrate two workhorse models in economics: The monopolistic competition model of Dixit and Stiglitz and the search unemployment model of Pissarides. Information and communication technology (ICT) is interpreted as a (i) technical progress in the matching function of the Pissarides labor market search model, where it is increasing the probability of filling a vacancy, and (ii) technical change in the production function of the Dixit-Stiglitz goods market model where it is increasing fixed costs and decreasing variable costs. All effects together, modeled as a permanent once-and-for-all ICT and internet shock, increase the vacancy/unemployment ratio, decrease the long-run equilibrium unemployment rate, and increase wages.

The use of computers in education has become commonplace. In this study with 162 nurse teachers, we found that although most nursing colleges in Finland have the necessary hardware for teaching informatics, teachers are not familiar with the software that is available for nursing education purposes. Teachers also lack confidence in their own abilities to cope with computer-assisted education. The information systems used in practical nursing are often inaccessible to nurse teachers. The teachers themselves say they would regularly need further training in their own computer skills.