Arthur Verkerke
In a digitalizing world, all kind of healthcare services are adopting more and more information systems. In the youth health care, this process is also going on. The fact that (1) children are not (yet) capable of standing up for their own rights and that (2) the maturation of children can be seriously harmed when information about treatments is misused makes this a special case in comparison to the digitisation of ‘regular’ healthcare received by adults. Since the involved people are in this case mainly the doctors providing youth care and the children receiving it, the focus of the social-cultural impacts will be mainly on these groups. However, in order to provide useful insights, the implications for the designers of information systems related to youth e-health care will also shortly be mentioned.
Therefore this paper focusses on the social-cultural impacts of two aspects of e-health; (1) the impacts of the implementation of electronic patient records and (2) digitalisation of the administration in the youth care. After a small introduction to the main concepts, first the impacts for the health care providers (both the doctors and the organisation hiring them) will be discussed. Then, the impacts for children and their parents are explored. Finally, the consequences of the impacts for developers of electronic patient records and digital administration systems will be discussed. In the end, the main socio-cultural impacts will be summarized and recommendations will be formulated. The insights of this paper will hopefully help the youth care to digitise its patient records and administration in a responsible way, while aware of the socio-cultural impact this might have.
Possible sources to use (besides given literature)
Abbott, P. A., Foster, J., Marin, H. F., & Dykes, P. C. (2013). Complexity and the science of implementation in health IT—Knowledge gaps and future visions. International journal of medical informatics.
Ludwick, D. A., & Doucette, J. (2009). Adopting electronic medical records in primary care: lessons learned from health information systems implementation experience in seven countries. International journal of medical informatics, 78(1), 22-31.
Nguyen, L., Bellucci, E., & Nguyen, L. T. (2014). Electronic Health Records Implementation: An Evaluation of Information System Impact and Contingency Factors. International journal of medical informatics.
I think your question is relevant and quite topical. You mentioned that the involved people are doctors and children. Aren’t the parents or guardians a vital link in the system? The information provided through an e-service or otherwise is mostly read and interpreted by the parents.
Are you using an existing e-service as an example? I was just wondering might there be different legal constraints in different countries. Then it might be good to narrow the investigation to some specific country. The health care systems are also quite different in different countries.
Your topic seems to be really interesting and very relevant in today’s world. For me it would have been helpful to know, what kind of misuse you are referring to. Do you mean security problems that could occur within the digital database and lead to a leak of patient files? Or do you refer to mistakes being made while digitalising old data, leading eventually to a wrong medication of the patients? Further, I also thought of the differences within the health care systems in different countries and agree with the previous commenter, that it might be useful to refer to a specific country or group of countries.
Otherwise I think that you structured your work really well and that I am looking forward to read your draft.
BR,
Frederik
The E-health is an important and interesting topic in our today´s world.
The structure of your paper is clear and well thought out.
For me is also an interesting to know, what are pro and cons of electronic patient records? Is it really better for us that all our personal data digitalize?
What security measures exist for the misuse of personal data prevented?
I would hope that maybe a few practical cases showing the advantages or disadvantages also the digitization of healthcare.
I have to admit that I don’t fully understand what you mean by the socio-cultural impact in this context? How are the children going to be impacted by the digitalization of their health information and why or how is the impact socio-cultural? I think you need to point out why the socio-cultural impact is interesting in this context since I would assume that the legal and ethical ramifactions would be more interesting and possibly more relevant in youth health care. I’m still unsure how youths social positions are truly changed by the digitization of their patient records I would at least assume their relative social and cultural role remain the same?
That being said it is an interesting topic you have chosen. There are a lot of practical and legal problems in this sort of endeavour of digitizing health records but their can be plenty of benefits to it as well. To give doctors and other medical professionals instant access to vital information can be the difference of life and death. Obviously this information in the wrong hands can also be exploited if access is given to commercial entities like pharamceutical companies.
Great. You probably have to be rather brief with your impact assessment because there is a whole lot of literature on this topic. Be also sure to explicit define what you mean with EMR/EHR. Is it the whole (medical) record, parts of it or a combination of patient and healthcare produced elements.