Staff at Danish hospitals spends far too much time on IT. Now researchers at the IT University of Copenhagen has studied how computer systems can be customized for the workflow at the hospitals so that staff can spend their time on what they are educated to do. The project can prove to be valuable not only in the hospital sector.

Doctors and nurses have to log on to IT systems numerous times during an ordinary workday at the hospital and often they have to use a lot of time finding the information they need. Thereby valuable time that could be used to treat patients is spent on IT. All these small difficulties may seem insignificant, but overall there is no doubt that extensive resources are wasted in front of screens in Denmark’s hospitals.

- It is a huge problem that doctors need to log on again and again – and that there is no integration between the different IT systems. You have to log on to one system to find a patient’s journals and another system to find his X-rays, says Hospital Medical Director at the Regional Hospital Horsens, Jørgen Schøler Kristensen.

The nomadic workers
Danish hospitals are not the only place where workers spend too much time on IT instead of doing the work they were actually trained to do. According to professor at the IT University of Copenhagen, Jakob Bardram, nomadic workers, i.e. workers who don’t use one specific desktop or office, will typically be able to optimize their workflow if IT systems were better integrated into one another.

-  Roughly speaking, the systems we use today are made for people who log on to their personal computer when they come into the office in the morning and perform more or less the same type of tasks until they log out and finish work in the afternoon, says Bardram and continues:

– But there are also many people who work from multiple locations during a workday and there are many people who multitask; they use one hour writing a business memo on the train and the next hour they are doing administrative work at home. Such people will often spend a lot of time finding the right programs and documents and logging in and out etc.

The process towards a more effective workday for the working nomads may very well start with the research project Acitivity-Based Computing, also called the ABC Project. The project, which is supported by The Danish Council for Strategic Research, is a collaboration between the IT University of Copenhagen, Aarhus University and Medical Insight, a company that develops advanced software for the use of healthcare images. Based on the workflow at the Regional Hospital Horsens a research group led by Jakob Bardram has developed several concepts for new IT systems that can ensure that doctors and nurses can use their time to treat patients.
 
- The ABC project offers different solutions. One of them consists in that doctors automatically get logged in when they enter a room with a computer – and that the journals of the patient they are about to treat, will pop up on the screen arranged in an easy and orderly manner, says Jakob Bardram.

Good, long-term outlook
The results of the ABC project have created enthusiasm all around. Not only has the evaluation of the research at the Regional Hospital Horsens clearly demonstrated that the concepts were heading in the right direction - one of the accountable doctors Jørgen Schøler Kristensen is convinced that more efficient IT systems is one of the keys to a better a healthcare system.

- Let me put it in this way: Many of the challenges facing us today with more and more elderly people, demands for higher quality and financial limitations, I think that new IT systems could help solve all these things.  Some of them anyway, he says.

Unfortunately, the nomadic workers will not be able to benefit from the ABC project in the near future, as it requires a whole new type of operating system to put the ideas into practice, and the development of such a system is an expensive and timely process. Jakob Bardram explains that the results from the ABC project are studied carefully at Microsoft Research and IBM Research and  that a large number of companies and researchers with interest in the area will work together in order to find out how Activity-Based Computing can be standardized. Furthermore, some of the ideas from the ABC project will be tested in practice at Bispebjerg Hospital as a part of the large, EU-funded project called “ICareNet”.

- We will take some of the key ideas and implement them in the existing systems, says Jakob Bardram. – We want to test our academic ideas in real life. It’s the best way to clarify if the academic idea actually works. Furthermore, it will also create visibility when we demonstrate how our research can be used by the doctors and nurses.

About the IT University
The IT University of Copenhagen has existed since 1999 and is an independent university dedicated to the digital world. There are about 2,000 students and 270 employees. The IT University researches and teaches within a wide spectrum of topics in the field of IT.

Additional information:
Professor Jakob Bardram, tlf. 2555 0446, bardram@itu.dk
Research Communicator Jari Kickbusch, tlf. 7218 5042, jark@itu.dk