Mobile health applications (mHealth apps) can provide effective self-management instruments for patients and offer advanced approaches to treatment. However, little is known about how the older population perceives the opportunity of using mHealth apps as a non-drug intervention. We aimed to identify the opinions and experiences of older people in Australia and gain new insights into their engagement with this modern approach to health treatment. We conducted a qualitative study with 21 Participants to explore users' perspectives on adopting and using mHealth apps and their awareness of the social factors influencing their uptake. The results show that a trusting doctor-patient relationship positively affects older adults' perceptions of mHealth apps. Consequently, the social influence of the General Practitioner (GP) plays a crucial role in the use of mHealth apps, while the social influence through family and friends seems to be less critical.
Cross-disciplinary approaches to remediate complex healthcare service delivery issues may have merit. This study aims to establish the potential benefits of applying service design and evaluative research concepts in healthcare. Specifically, this study aims to demonstrate how a Customer Journey Map and a Logic Model could be used in unison to identify and remedy service delivery gaps to reduce barriers to care. This study provides systems thinking approach to solving operational issues in healthcare.
Health information technology is often assumed to improve healthcare. However, expectations of health information technology are seldomly met in full for multiple reasons. While the implementation of health information technology, is increasingly being investigated and evaluated, less attention has been paid to the preceding choices made by key people on how to share relevant information in new HIT systems. This study brings to light the central considerations exercised by key people in charge of managing the process of how to share information through locally developing new digital systems for quality information management. The multiple decisions revolved around three main considerations: user conditions and role, integration into local setup, and resources. Weighing the cost benefit balances of these perspectives are likely to influence subsequent access to and use of high-quality information in public healthcare and are therefore central to the management of effective health information technology.
High cholesterol is a risk factor for developing Atherosclerotic Cardiovascular Disease. Poorly designed health data displays cause an undue cognitive burden on clinicians. Simplified line graphs (i.e., sparklines) could support efficient cognitive processing and interpretation of lipid panel results. Clinical concepts for cognitive tasks assessing low-density lipoprotein laboratory results were analyzed according to their internal representations and data scale types. A sparkline external representation aligns more closely with the internal representations for mental tasks associated with identifying abnormalities and assessing trends compared to traditional tabular displays. By simplifying the health data display with sparklines, faster cognitive processing is theoretically supported.
Electronic medication management systems (EMMS) have been implemented in most acute care settings in Australia to reduce medication error rates. One of the key challenges related to the introduction of EMMS in hospitals is the uptake of informal “workarounds” by clinicians, including nurses. In this study, we aimed to examine one workaround in depth, nurses not documenting medication administration in the EMMS at the time of administration. We conducted a review of incident reports to identify the factors that contribute to this workaround occurring and the consequences or potential consequences of this workaround on patients. We identified a range of contributing factors, with factors relating to the user (e.g. nurses being time poor) occurring most frequently in incident reports. The most frequently seen consequence of this workaround was the patient receiving an additional dose. This research revealed that strategies to reduce the uptake of this workaround should consider user and organisational factors rather than just EMMS design alone.
