The status of IT service management in health care - ITIL® in selected European countries

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Due to the strained financial situation in the healthcare sector, hospitals and other healthcare providers are facing an increasing pressure to improve their efficiency and to reduce costs. These trends challenge health care organizations to introduce innovative information technology (IT) based supportive processes. To guarantee that IT supports the clinical processes perfectly, IT must be managed proactively. However, until now, there is only very few research on IT service management especially on ITIL^®implementations in the health care context.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>The current study aims at exploring knowledge about and acceptance of IT service management (especially ITIL^®) in hospitals in Austria and its neighboring regions Bavaria (Germany), Slovakia, South Tyrol (Italy) and Switzerland. Therefore highly standardized interviews with the respective head of information technology (CIO, IT manager) were conducted for selected hospitals from the different regions. In total 75 hospitals were interviewed. Data gathered was analyzed using descriptive statistics and where necessary methods of qualitative content analysis.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>In most regions, two-thirds or more of the participating IT managers claim to be familiar with the concepts of IT service management and of ITIL^®. IT managers expect from ITIL^®mostly better IT services, followed by an increased productivity and a reduction of IT cost. But only five hospitals said to have implemented at least parts of ITIL^®, and eight hospitals stated to be planning to do this in the next two years. When it comes to ITIL^®, Switzerland and Bavaria seem to be ahead of the other countries. There, the highest levels of knowledge, the highest number of implementations or plans of an implementation as well as the highest number of ITIL^®certified staff members were observed.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>The results collected through this study indicate that the idea of IT services and IT service management is still not widely recognized in hospitals in the countries and regions of the study. It is also indicated that hospitals need further assistance in order to be able to successfully implement ITIL^®. Overall, research on IT service management and ITIL^®in health care is rare.</p

The Impact of eHealth on the Quality and Safety of Health Care: A Systematic Overview

Aziz Sheikh and colleagues report the findings of their systematic overview that assessed the impact of eHealth solutions on the quality and safety of health care

Quality of Electronic Health Records - Coverage of Potential Information Weaknesses by Major EHR Quality Seals

Objectives: The Certification Commission for Healthcare Information Technology (CCHIT) and EuroRec offer the most prominent functional approaches to Electronic Health Record quality certification in the US and Europe. The current study aims at the analysis of these approaches from the perspective of weaknesses in information exchange. Furthermore, the implicit coverage of the information dimension within their functional requirements is analyzed. Methods: The quality frameworks from the CCHIT and EuroRec were compared to a comprehensive and universal categorization of communication errors in order to determine the communication problems anticipated by these two approaches. Results: The approaches of the CCHIT and EuroRec anticipate nearly the same communication errors but their number with regard to the error categorization is rather low. The two approaches include problem classes, such as authorization problems, wrong details in data, data loss, and poor quality content. Areas that are not covered include application errors, errors with regard to information transcription, etc. Conclusion: The current study points out that the approaches of the CCHIT and EuroRec only cover a small part of the possible communication errors with their functional requirements. Therefore, an integration of the identified, missing errors in the requirements proposed by CCHIT and EuroRec should be closely considered

E-Health in Europe: Current situation and challenges ahead

International audienc

Physicians' Perceptions on the usefulness of contextual information for prioritizing and presenting alerts in computerized physician order entry systems

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>One possible approach towards avoiding alert overload and alert fatigue in Computerized Physician Order Entry (CPOE) systems is to tailor their drug safety alerts to the context of the clinical situation. Our objective was to identify the perceptions of physicians on the usefulness of clinical context information for prioritizing and presenting drug safety alerts.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>We performed a questionnaire survey, inquiring CPOE-using physicians from four hospitals in four European countries to estimate the usefulness of 20 possible context factors.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>The 223 participants identified the <it>‘</it>s<it>everity of the effect’</it> and the <it>‘clinical status of the patient’</it> as the most useful context factors. Further important factors are the <it>‘complexity of the case’</it> and the <it>‘risk factors of the patient’</it>.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>Our findings confirm the results of a prior, comparable survey inquiring CPOE researchers. Further research should focus on implementing these context factors in CPOE systems and on subsequently evaluating their impact.</p