The COPE LBP trial: Cognitive Patient Education for Low Back Pain - a cluster randomized controlled trial in primary care

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Non-specific low back pain (LBP) is usually self-limiting within 4-6 weeks. Longstanding pain and disability are not predictable from clinical signs or pathoanatomical findings. Pain cognition and physical performance have been shown to improve patients with chronic LBP following neurophysiological education. The primary aim of this study is to evaluate whether a specific cognitive based education programme for patients with LBP in primary care is more effective than normal care in terms of increased function. The secondary aims of the study are to evaluate whether this intervention also results in earlier return to work, decreased pain, increased patient satisfaction, increased quality-of-life, and cost utility.</p> <p>Methods/Design</p> <p>Cluster randomised controlled trial with 20 general practitioners and 20 physiotherapists in primary care as the unit of randomisation. Each practitioner will recruit up to 10 patients, aged 20 to 55 years, with non-specific sub-acute/chronic LBP of more than four weeks but less than 1 year's duration. Practitioners in the intervention arm will provide cognitive patient education intervention in up to four weekly sessions, each lasting 30 minutes. Practitioners in the control arm will provide normal treatment, but have to make four appointments for the patients. Patients, outcome assessors, and study statistician will be blinded to group allocation.</p> <p>Discussion</p> <p>We present the rationale and design of an ongoing RCT study that potentially offers an easily implemented treatment strategy for LBP patients in primary care. The results will be available in 2012.</p> <p>Trial registration</p> <p>ISRCTN04323845</p

A Usability Evaluation of an Electronic Health Record System for Nursing Documentation Used in the Municipality Healthcare Services in Norway

Published version of a chapter in the book: HCI in Business. Also available from the publisher at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-07293-7_67The paper presents a usability evaluation of the Graphical User Interface (GUI) of an Electronic Health Record System (EHR). The topic of interest was to explore the system's usability in the context of nursing process documentation. A cognitive walk through approach was used. The data were analyzed with content analysis and the results show that challenges identified were related to navigating and finding information in the system. Even though there were problems in progressing from one phase to another in nursing process documentation, the system represented some types of predictability and consistency in the functions. Education, training and support are needed to be able to use the EHR for nursing documentation. Mandating standardization regarding format, content and terminology to improve the EHR systems functionality regarding facilitate nursing process documentation is recommended

Trust in Sociotechnical Systems

The purpose of this pane: is to provide a general overview and discussion of trust relationships in sociotechnical systems. The panel will be composed of five well-known experts in complex systems research and will offer differing views on the concept of trust in these systems. The panel will consist of a brief introduction sociotechnical and macroergonomic theory followed by a comprehensive overview of conceptualizing trust as a sociotechnical construct. The range of concepts discussed in this panel include: trust in and through technologies, interpersonal trust in virtual teams and virtual agents and trust in particular domains such as health care, and driving. This panel will highlight successful projects or approaches to conceptualizing trust in complex work systems that include individuals, groups and technologies. Copyright 2010 by Human Factors and Ergonomics Society, Inc. All rights reserved

Towards the Adoption of Open Source and Open Access Electronic Health Record Systems

As the Electronic Health Record (EHR) systems constantly expand to support more clinical activities and their implementations in healthcare organizations become more widespread, several communities have been working intensively for several years to develop open access and open source EHR software, aiming at reducing the costs of EHR deployment and maintenance. In this paper, we describe and evaluate the most popular open source electronic medical records such as openEMR, openMRS and patientOS, providing their technical features and potentials. These systems are considered quite important due to their prevalence. The article presents the key features of each system and outlines the advantages and problems of Open Source Software (OSS) Systems through a review of the literature, in order to demonstrate the possibility of their adoption in modern electronic healthcare systems. Also discussed are the future trends of OS EHRs in the context of the Personal Health Records and mobile computing paradigm