News from the Health Informatics Centre

News from the Health Informatics Centre

2017

October 2017: Therese Scott Duncan is the new doctoral student at HIC. She will examine how patients with chronic condition are using personal eHealth solutions for their selfcare, and what motivates them to do so. Building on this concept, will increase the level of understanding of how they use personal eHealth in order to be empowered within their selfcare. This could give input to a model to help healthcare meet patients' different needs accordingly, as well to how eHealth solutions could be developed in the future to meet the needs of the users. Main supervisor is Maria Hägglund, associate professor at HIC. Co-supervisors are Sabine Koch, professor at HIC and Lena Sharp, PhD, RN at Stockholm County Council (SLL), Regional Cancer Center Stockholm-Gotland (RCC).

August 2017: Maria Hägglund from HIC attended the Medinfo 2017 conference in Hangzhou, China. She presented a paper co-authored with Isabella Scandurra from Örebro university describing the current status of Patient Accessible Electronic Health Records (PAEHR) in Sweden and a retrospect of the challenges that have been observed over the years. The paper was nominated for the Best paper award, and got the third prize! In total 248 papers were presented at the conference. The proceedings will be published open access, but as this process has been delayed we attach a draft version of the paper here for now.

August 2017: Maria Hägglund, senior researcher at HIC and programme director for the Health Informatics master programme, is now Associate Professor or Docent of health informatics at Karolinska Institutet. The institution of Docent has existed since the 19th century and the title Docent gives the right to publicly dispute and privately teach with the consent of the Dean and faculty (lat. venia docendi). A Docent is required to conduct research and must therefore possess both pedagogic and scientific competence. Maria Hägglund has extensive experience with both, and will be an important resource to health informatics research and education at KI in the future.

August 2017: Professor Sabine Koch from HIC has now been elected as the next president for IMIA, International Medical Informatics Association. The International Medical Informatics Association (IMIA) is the world body for health and biomedical informatics. As an ‘association of associations’, IMIA acts as a bridging organisation, bringing together the constituent organisations and their members. IMIA provides leadership and expertise to the multidisciplinary, health focused community and to policy makers, to enable the transformation of healthcare in accord with the world-wide vision of improving the health of the world population. At HIC, we are very proud that Sabine Koch will become the next president, and we are convinced that she will do an excellent job!

June 2017: Sara Riggare, PhD student at the Health Informatics Centre, was interviewed for a perspective piece on data-sharing in medical research that was recently published in The New England Journal of Medicine (link to article). In the article, Sara shares her experiences and views on the topic, as do other well-known patient advocates and activists.

June 2017: Sabine Koch elected as founding member of the International Academy of Health Sciences Informatics Professor Sabine Koch has been elected to the inaugural class of the International Academy of Health Sciences Informatics (IAHSI). The Academy was established earlier this year by the International Medical Informatics Association (IMIA), which held a comprehensive nomination process to select the founding members. According to IMIA, “the Academy will serve as an international forum for peers in biomedical and health informatics” and “will play an important role in exchanging knowledge, providing education and training, and producing policy documents, e.g., recommendations and position statements.” There are 120 founding Academy members representing over 30 nations from across the globe. Only 42 founding members are from Europe whereof 3 from Sweden, including Koch. Members of the Academy are deemed as “living leaders in health informatics worldwide” according to IMIA. Koch holds the Strategic Professorship in Health Informatics at Karolinska Institutet and leads the Centre for Health Informatics which belongs to the Department of Learning, Informatics, Management and Ethics and the Department of Medicine, Solna. Koch considers the election a great honour and looks forward to working with many prestigious colleagues within the Academy to continue advancements in the field of biomedical and health informatics worldwide and not least in Sweden. The first class of the Academy will be inducted in late August during the 16th World Congress on Medical and Health Informatics in Hangzhou, China.

2016

August 2016: HIC receives FORTE grant together with South African researchers

July 2016: Aboozar Eghdam´s project is the winner of the KTH Innovation Challenge 2016 Research edition. His project together with Farhad Abtahi from the School of Technology and Health titled “Gamified Heart Rate Variability (HRV)" has been selected as winner and was awarded with 50.000 SEK.

July 2016: Sara Riggare and citizen science The exhibition, which is part of the EU’s citizen science awareness-raising programme Sparks, focuses on biological innovations, specifically in the realm of health and medicine, and showcases developments from Portugal, the Netherlands, Sweden and the UK. Some are group start-ups – Pieter van Boheemen’s open biology laboratory in Amsterdam, for instance – while others are solo initiatives, such as Sara Riggare’s long-term, self-examination project to tackle her own Parkinson’s disease.

June 2016: Ny rapport om Klinisk IT-governance: HIC-forskarna Malin Nordström och Sabine Koch har, tillsammans med Jenny Lagsten, Örebro Universitet och Johan Permert, Karolinska Universitetssjukhuset och KI, genomfört en studie om IT-governance i landstingsägd vård och skrivit en rapport om hur samklangen mellan klinisk verksamhet och informationssystem kan förbättras. I rapporten beskrivs nuvarande IT-governance arbete i Sverige och ett nytt begrepp; klinisk IT-governance myntas. Rapporten berör också resultat från Innovationslabbet för eHälsa, stationerat på Karolinska Universitetssjukhuset, samt behovet av utbildning av informatiker.

March 2016: Maria Hägglund, researcher at HIC, has been awarded a travel grant from the Institute Français to visit the Clinical Investigation Center for Innovative Technologies (CIC-IT) and the Evalab unit at CIC-IT in Lille. The Evalab lab was the first usability lab dedicated to Health Information Technologies (HIT) created in Europe. It aims at improving the quality of the services and products generated by the new technologies, used by the healthcare professionals, the patients and their family/helpers. The purpose of the visit is to promote future collaborations between Swedish and French research groups. In total, Maria will spend 4 weeks in Lille during 2016.

March 2016: MedTech Magazine’s list of most powerful - Sara Riggare in 6th place Once again, the Health Informatics Centre is represented on the list of most powerful in Swedish MedTech presented by MedTech Magazine. Last year, PhD student Sara Riggare was in first place, this year she’s in 6th place. We are very proud of the excellent work she’s doing! "Sara Riggare är patient, forskare och entreprenör. Eftersom hon är engagerad i flera viktiga delar av medtechvärlden, och dessutom besitter en enorm social förmåga med nätverk i hela världen, toppade hon Maktlistan i fjol. Hon är också med i regeringens expertgrupp för life science-sektorn. Hennes inflytande kommer knappast minska."