Patient-centered Coordination in Healthcare Service Networks - Measuring and Improving Inter-organizational Information Flow

This thesis investigates the idea of a coordination service that improves the information flow between independent stakeholders along the patient care pathway. Based on identified requirements regarding process, ICT-structure, and legal constraints, a stroke-specific coordination service was developed, validated, implemented, and evaluated. A randomized controlled trial showed improved patients\u27 HRQoL and competences, positive cost-benefit ratio, and acceptance by the involved stakeholders

Quantifying the Quantified Self: A Study on the Motivations of Patients to Track Their Own Health

A new generation of patient-driven healthcare information systems (HIS) is emerging to advance traditional healthcare services and empower patient self-responsibility. Pro-fessional approaches to develop or improve HIS exist alongside evolving individual and community-shared approaches where patients take responsibility for their health data and health. Health Social Networks and the Quantified Self community are examples for such patient-driven initiatives. They inherently focus on empowering self-determination and responsibility. The success of future HIS relies – at least partially – on their engi-neers’ and developers’ capability to understand and use impulses from their respective target groups. The present study on self-tracking motivations aims to shed light on what drives people to track themselves. To this end, we conducted an exploratory survey with 150 self-trackers and developed a Five-Factor-Framework of Self-Tracking Motivations. The framework includes an inventory of five factors and a psychometrical scale of 19 items to measure individual drivers for self-tracking

Proceedings of the First Karlsruhe Service Summit Workshop - Advances in Service Research, Karlsruhe, Germany, February 2015 (KIT Scientific Reports ; 7692)

Since April 2008 KSRI fosters interdisciplinary research in order to support and advance the progress in the service domain. KSRI brings together academia and industry while serving as a European research hub with respect to service science. For KSS2015 Research Workshop, we invited submissions of theoretical and empirical research dealing with the relevant topics in the context of services including energy, mobility, health care, social collaboration, and web technologies

Web 2.0 im Gesundheitswesen – Ein Literature Review zur Aufarbeitung aktueller Forschungsergebnisse zu Health 2.0 Anwendungen

In den letzten Jahren stieg die Internetnutzung stark an und Web 2.0 Anwendungen hielten Einzug in das Gesundheitswesen. Health 2.0 beschreibt die Übertragung von Anwendungen und Prinzipien des Web 2.0 auf das Gesundheitswesen. Das interaktive Erstellen, Verteilen und kollaborative Bearbeiten von Gesundheitsinformationen stehen im Vordergrund. Trotz zahlreicher Publikationen zu Health 2.0 fehlt eine systematische Aufarbeitung des Forschungsstandes. Dieser Beitrag beantwortet folgende Forschungsfragen: (1) „Was sind wesentliche Forschungsthemen im Kontext von Health 2.0 Anwendungen?“, (2) „Welche aktuellen Forschungsergebnisse finden sich in der Literatur zu den identifizierten Forschungsthemen?“. Dazu wurde eine systematische Literaturrecherche durchgeführt. Durch Clusterbildung der identifizierten Forschungsfragen wurden bearbeitete Forschungsthemen abgeleitet und aktuelle Forschungsergebnisse analysiert. Dabei wurde festgestellt, dass sich die Literatur zu Health 2.0 auf das Nutzungsverhalten, die Akzeptanz- und Vertrauensforschung, die eingesetzten Technologien sowie die Entwicklung, Evaluierung und Potenzialabschätzung von entsprechenden Anwendungen konzentriert. Weiterer Forschungsbedarf besteht dabei u.a. in einer Geschäftsmodellanalyse und der Entwicklung von solchen Anwendungen

STROKE MANAGEMENT AS A SERVICE - A DISTRIBUTED AND MOBILE ARCHITECTURE FOR POST-ACUTE STROKE MANAGEMENT

Stroke is the second leading cause of death for people older than 60 and the most common cause of disability for adults worldwide, which leads to enormous societal healthcare costs. In contrast to acute stroke treatment, the improvement of the complex processes during the post-acute stroke treatment in a regional healthcare service network (HSN) did not receive much attention. Currently, there are no post-acute stroke care management approaches in Germany that exploit the advantages of information technology even though it is one of the most expensive diseases. Unfortunately, chronic care concepts of other diseases cannot easily be transferred. Therefore, we investigated the state-of-the-art post-acute stroke workflows, identified requirements for a general architecture that supports the current post-acute stroke management and developed a novel stroke manager service according to the requirements using a combined service engineering and software engineering approach. The contribution of this paper is threefold: It lists requirements for an effective post-stroke management, describes the complex inter-institutional workflow of a novel stroke manager service and presents a prototypically implemented stroke manager architecture. The requirements and the stroke manager service as well as the architecture have been evaluated by domain experts

Histopathology laboratory operations analysis and improvement

Histopathology laboratories aim to deliver high quality diagnoses based on patient tissue samples. Indicators for quality are the accuracy of the diagnoses and the diagnostic turnaround times. However, challenges exist regarding employee workload and turnaround times in the histopathology laboratory. This paper proposes a decomposed planning and scheduling method for the histopathology laboratory using (mixed) integer linear programming ((M)ILP) to improve the spread of workload and reduce the diagnostic turnaround times. First, the batching problem is considered, in which batch completion times are equally divided over the day to spread the workload. This reduces the peaks of physical work available in the laboratory. Thereafter, the remaining processes are scheduled to minimize the tardiness of orders. Preliminary results show that using this decomposition method, the peaks in histopathology workload in UMC Utrecht, a large university medical center in the Netherlands, are potentially reduced with up to 50% by better spreading the workload over the day. Furthermore, turnaround times are potentially reduced with up to 20% compared to current practices