Sabine Koch

Karolinska Institutet | KI · Department of Learning, Informatics, Management and Ethics

Background Patient empowerment is an important concept and a movement toward person-centered care of patients with chronic conditions. Nevertheless, to date, most research on empowered patients or informal caregivers has been conducted from a narrow clinical perspective. Such research has mainly focused on how health care professionals can empower...

Background The purpose of educational recommendations is to assist in establishing courses and programs in a discipline, to further develop existing educational activities in the various nations, and to support international initiatives for collaboration and sharing of courseware. The International Medical Informatics Association (IMIA) has publish...

Background and objective: Chest pain is one of the most common complaints in emergency departments (EDs). Self-reported computerized history taking (CHT) programmes can be used for interpretation of the clinical significance of medical information coming directly from patients. The adoption of CHT in clinical practice depends on reactions and atti...

The main goals of the Swedish eHealth strategy are to enable citizens to achieve good and equal health and welfare, and to support self-determination and increased participation in society. We analyzed the relationship between these goals and the use of eHealth services offered for citizens prior to and during the COVID-19 pandemic. Data was collec...

Objectives: To summarize the activities of the International Academy of Health Sciences Informatics (IAHSI) in 2021 and welcome its 2021 Class of Fellows. Methods: Report on governance, strategic directions, newly elected fellows, plenary meetings, and other activities of the Academy. Results: As in 2020, all of the Academy's activities were carrie...

Funding Acknowledgements Type of funding sources: Foundation. Main funding source(s): Robert Bosch Stiftung (Stuttgart, Germany) Region Stockholm (ALF project; Stockholm, Sweden) Introduction Chest pain is a common chief complaint in emergency departments (EDs). The Acute Cardiovascular Care Association recommends the use of History, ECG, Age, Ris...

Patients’ medical histories are the salient dataset for diagnosis. Prior work shows consistently, however, that medical history-taking by physicians generally is incomplete and not accurate. Such findings suggest that methods to improve the completeness and accuracy of medical history data could have clinical value. We address this issue with exper...

Citation: Nifakos, S.; Chandramouli, K.; Nikolaou, C.K.; Papachristou, P.; Koch, S.; Panaousis, E.; Bonacina, S. Influence of Human Factors on Cyber Security within Healthcare Organisations: A Systematic Review.

The European Commission published in 2019 the Recommendation on the European Electronic Health Record exchange format (EHRxF) to support citizens and healthcare providers in securely accessing and sharing EHRs. The European EHRxF is expected to contribute to the digital transformation of health and care in the digital single market empowering citiz...

E-health offers new ways to access health information, to deliver health and social care and to perform self-management [...]

BACKGROUND Chest pain is one of the most common complaints in emergency departments (EDs). The effectiveness of care for patients with chest pain requires that individual circumstances and the complexity of the patient's clinical issues are determined by medical history taking. The knowledge base for history taking and for interpreting the clinical...

Background: Chest pain is one of the most common chief complaints in emergency departments (EDs). Collecting an adequate medical history is challenging but essential in order to use recommended risk scores such as the HEART score (based on history, electrocardiogram, age, risk factors, and troponin). Self-reported computerized history taking (CHT)...

Objectives: To summarize the major activities of the International Academy of Health Sciences Informatics (IAHSI) in the 2020 time period and to welcome its 2020 Class of Fellows. Method: Report from the members of the Academy’s Board. Results: Due to the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, both Plenary meetings in 2020 had to be organized as virtual meetings. Sc...

Background: On December 16, 2020 representatives of the International Medical Informatics Association (IMIA), a Non-Governmental Organization in official relations with the World Health Organization (WHO), along with its International Academy for Health Sciences Informatics (IAHSI), held an open dialogue with WHO Director General (WHO DG) Tedros Ad...

Despite the great advances in the field of electronic health records (EHRs) over the past 25 years, implementation and adoption challenges persist, and the benefits realized remain below expectations. This scoping review aimed to present current knowledge about the effects of EHR implementation and the barriers to EHR adoption and use. A literature...

Introduction: Technical and logical breakthroughs have provided new opportunities in medicine to use knowledge bases and large-scale clinical data (real-world) at point-of-care as part of a learning healthcare system to diminish the knowledge-practice gap. Areas covered: The article is based on presentations, discussions and recommendations from...

Both private and public primary healthcare providers increasingly offer their patients online consultation services on request. However, the actual use of these services from a physician's perspective as well as the educational competencies required by the physicians are insufficiently studied. The aim of this study is therefore to explore how gene...

Objectives: To summarize the major activities of the International Academy of Health Sciences Informatics (IAHSI) from 2018 until 2019, and to provide an outline of actions planned for 2020. Method: Reporting about these activities and actions by the members of the Academy's first Board. Results: Academy bylaws were accepted by the Academy Plenary...

Introduction Management of acute chest pain focuses on diagnosis or safe rule-out of an acute coronary syndrome (ACS). We aim to determine the additional value of self-reported computerised history taking (CHT). Methods and analysis Prospective cohort study design with self-reported, medical histories collected by a CHT programme (Clinical Expert...

Objectives This study aims to present eHealth indicators on cross-institutional availability of relevant patient data for health care professionals, as well as for patients and their caregivers across 14 countries (Argentina, Australia, Austria, Finland, Germany, Hong Kong as a special administrative region of China, Israel, Japan, Jordan, Kenya, S...

Background: Current health care systems are rarely designed to meet the needs of people living with chronic conditions. However, some patients and informal caregivers are not waiting for the health care system to redesign itself. These individuals are sometimes referred to as e-patients. The first generation of e-patients used the internet for find...

Conducting evaluation and monitoring of national eHealth implementation aligned with national eHealth strategies should be prioritized concerning the insufficient scientific evidence and the current challenges in measuring eHealth effects and impacts where most approaches aim to measure at the micro level. This study aimed to build an evaluation an...

Vital Sign Data Quality is essential for successful implementation of clinical decision support systems in emergency care. Studies have shown that data quality is inadequate and needs improvement. This study shows that data quality is dependent on both technical and human factors and provides a conceptual model of data quality governance and improv...

The International Medical Informatics Association (IMIA), a non-governmental, not-for-profit, global organization promoting health and biomedical informatics, is committed to the right of communities/populations and individuals to science, comprised of three separate constituent rights: 1) the right to participate in science, 2) the right to benefi...

Background Patients and citizens need access to their health information to get a retrospective as well as a prospective view on their care and rehabilitation processes. However, patients’ health information is stored in several health information systems and interoperability problems often hamper accessibility. In Sweden a national health informat...

Background Integration of electronic information is a challenge for multitasking emergency providers, with implications for patient safety. Visual representations can assist sense-making of complex data sets; however, benefit and acceptability in emergency care is unproven. Objectives This article evaluates visually focused alternatives to lists or...

BACKGROUND The first generation of e-patients were equipped, empowered, enabled, and engaged patients and informal caregivers, who used the Internet for finding information or for communication, to solve a personal need. There is however a lack of knowledge about e-patients’ driving forces for engaging in their own health and care. This knowledge c...

Background Current health care systems are rarely designed to meet the needs of people living with chronic conditions. However, some patients and informal caregivers are not waiting for the health care system to redesign itself. These individuals are sometimes referred to as e-patients. The first generation of e-patients used the internet for findi...

Background Emergency medicine is characterized by a high patient flow where timely decisions are essential. Clinical decision support systems have the potential to assist in such decisions but will be dependent on the data quality in electronic health records which often is inadequate. This study explores the effect of automated documentation of vi...

Background Holistic, ubiquitous support of patient-centered health care (eHealth) at all health care institutions and in patients' homes through information processing is increasingly supplementing institution-centered care. While eHealth indicators may measure the transition from institution-centered (e.g., hospital-centered) information processin...

Cancer is a major public health challenge in developing countries but the healthcare systems are not well prepared to deal with the epidemic. Health information technologies such as electronic medical records (EMRs) have the potential to improve cancer care yet their adoption remains low, in part due to EMR systems not meeting user requirements. Th...

The Nordic eHealth Research Network, a subgroup of the Nordic Council of Ministers eHealth group, is working on developing indicators to monitor progress in availability, use and outcome of eHealth applications in the Nordic countries. This paper reports on the consecutive analysis of National eHealth policies in the Nordic countries from 2012 to 2...

Information and communication technologies (ICTs) in healthcare have been around for many decades. Yet their potential is not fully exploited. This talk will give an overview over some areas within health informatics, specifically patient-centred information systems, decision support and health-enabling and ambient assistive technologies. The devel...

This report proposes a long-term management of earlier NeRN work to be utilized also in the European and OECD context, and indicators on patients and citizens' use and experiences of eHealth services. An update to prior eHealth policy analysis shows an increase on governance and stakeholder involvement in all countries. The existing NeRN indicators...

Background: Computerized clinical decision support and automation of warnings have been advocated to assist clinicians in detecting patients at risk of physiological instability. To provide reliable support such systems are dependent on high-quality vital sign data. Data quality depends on how, when and why the data is captured and/or documented....

May 1st, 2017, will mark Dieter Bergemann’s 80th birthday. As Chief Executive Officer and Owner of Schattauer Publishers from 1983 to 2016, the biomedical and health informatics community owes him a great debt of gratitude. The past and present editors of Methods of Information in Medicine, the IMIA Yearbook of Medical Informatics, and Applied Clin...

May 1st, 2017, will mark Dieter Bergemann's 80th birthday. As Chief Executive Officer and Owner of Schattauer Publishers from 1983 to 2016, the biomedical and health informatics community owes him a great debt of gratitude. The past and present editors of Methods of Information in Medicine, the IMIA Yearbook of Medical Informatics, and Applied Clin...

Background: Early involvement of stakeholders in the design of medical software is particularly important due to the need to incorporate complex knowledge and actions associated with clinical work. Standard user-centered design methods include focus groups and participatory design sessions with individual stakeholders, which generally limit user i...

Background: Malaysia and Sweden have mapped their acute coronary syndrome registries using SNOMED CT. Since similar-purposed patient registries can be expected to collect similar data, these data should be mapped to the same SNOMED CT codes despite the different languages used. Previous studies have however shown variations in mapping between diff...

The central role of eHealth to enable the successful implementation of integrated care is commonly acknowledged today. This is easier said than done. To provide correct, understandable, and timely information at the point of need and to facilitate communication and decision support for a network of actors with different prerequisites and needs are...

Background: Medical informatics, or biomedical and health informatics (BMHI), has become an established scientific discipline. In all such disciplines there is a certain inertia to persist in focusing on well-established research areas and to hold on to well-known research methodologies rather than adopting new ones, which may be more appropriate....

Background Interoperability standards intend to standardise health information, clinical practice guidelines intend to standardise care procedures, and patient data registries are vital for monitoring quality of care and for clinical research. This study combines all three: it uses interoperability specifications to model guideline knowledge and ap...

We report our experiences from the Massive Open Online Course (MOOC), "eHealth - Opportunities and Challenges", run by Karolinska Institutet using the edx platform both as session-based and self-paced versions between 2015 and 2016. In total, 13,302 students from 162 different countries were enrolled in our courses during the two-year period whereo...

Introduction Social media has the potential to increase social participation and support for the well-being of individuals with chronic medical conditions. To date, Facebook is the most popular social medium for different types of communication. However, there is a lack of knowledge about the potential use of Facebook as a means of communication fo...

From 2017 (volume 56) onwards the journal Methods of Information in Medicine will consist of two tracks. Authors can decide to submit their manuscript to either the subscription track that continues to publish its six print and electronic (non-open access) issues for journal subscribers, or the new Methods Open track that will consist of digitally...

This article is part of a For-Discussion-Section of Methods of Information in Medicine about the paper "The New Role of Biomedical Informatics in the Age of Digital Medicine" written by Fernando J. Martin-Sanchez and Guillermo H. Lopez-Campos [1]. It is introduced by an editorial. This article contains the combined commentaries invited to independe...

Biomedical and Health Informatics have become important disciplines for medicine and the health sciences. To remain re levant, the focus of Biomedical and Health Informatics on research and practice as well as translational matters has to be continuously discussed, analyzed, and adapted [1]. Scientific journals play an important role in this matter...

Introduction: Mild acquired cognitive impairment is a term used to describe a sub-group of persons with mild cognitive impairment who are expected to reach a stable cognitive level over time. One tactic that can be considered for further developing treatment for this group is the use of information and communication technology and e-services. The...

The ICT-CFQ questionnaire. (DOCX)

Background: During the last decades, health-enabling and ambient assistive technologies became of considerable relevance for new informatics-based forms of diagnosis, prevention, and therapy. Objectives: To describe the state of the art of health-enabling and ambient assistive technologies in 1992 and today, and its evolution over the last 25 ye...

Background Despite the potential of eHealth services to revolutionize the way healthcare and prevention is provided many applications developed for patients fail to deliver their promise. Therefore, the aim of this study is to use patient journey mapping to explore post-discharge stroke patients’ information needs to propose eHealth services that m...

Background: Vital sign data are important for clinical decision making in emergency care. Clinical Decision Support Systems (CDSS) have been advocated to increase patient safety and quality of care. However, the efficiency of CDSS depends on the quality of the underlying vital sign data. Therefore, possible factors affecting vital sign data qualit...

A prescription and medication service that is optimised to protect against unnecessary harm is an essential component of a safer healthcare system. To this means, the Nordic countries have put considerable efforts in digitizing their prescription and dispensing processes and making medication related eHealth services available for clinicians, pharm...

Reduced heart rate variability (HRV) is an indicator of a malfunctioning autonomic nervous system. Resonant frequency breathing is a potential non-invasive means of intervention for improving the balance of the autonomic nervous system and increasing HRV. However, such breathing exercises are regarded as boring and monotonous tasks. The use of gami...

Governments around the world are actively promoting citizens electronic access to their health data as one of a number of ways to respond to the challenges of health care delivery in the 21st century. While numerous approaches have been utilized it is evident from crosscountry comparisons that there are different conceptualizations of: both the exp...

Sickle cell disease (SCD) is the most prevalent blood inherited disorder in the world. Patients suffer from several chronic issues, comorbidities and high-mortality rates. Despite its prevalence, the disease remains largely ignored. A literature review was conducted and a questionnaire was sent to patients in order to understand the potential of e-...

Background: In 1962, Methods of Information in Medicine (MIM) began to publish papers on the methodology and scientific fundamentals of managing data, information, and knowledge in biomedicine and health care. Meeting an increasing demand for research about practical implementation of health information systems, the journal Applied Clinical Inform...

This editorial is part of the Focus Theme of Methods of Information in Medicine on “Big Data and Analytics in Healthcare”. The amount of data being generated in the healthcare industry is growing at a rapid rate. This has generated immense interest in leveraging the availability of healthcare data (and “big data”) to improve health outcomes and red...

Background— Intravenous thrombolysis (IVT) for acute ischemic stroke is subject to label and guideline contraindications. Updated European guidelines in 2008/2009 recommended IVT in selected patients aged >80 years and stroke onset-to-treatment time 3 to 4.5 hours, which the label still prohibited. Our aim was to compare contraindication nonadheren...

The objective of the study is to describe the lung cancer care process as experienced by patients, as well as to perform a qualitative analysis of problems they encounter throughout the patient journey. A user-centered design approach was used and data collected through two focus group meetings with patients. We present the results in the form of a...

Sickle cell disease (SCD) is the most prevalent inherited blood disorder in the world. The symptoms decrease the quality of life of patients and can cause premature death. Self-help solutions for chronic patients are rising and increase the quality of life of patients. We are interested to identify the usefulness of eHealth tools for patients with...

A prescription and medication service that is optimised to protect against unnecessary harm is an essential component of a safer healthcare system. To this means, the Nordic countries have put considerable efforts in digitizing their prescription and dispensing processes and making medication eHealth services available for clinicians, pharmacists a...