FHIES symposium

I’m back from the Foundations of Health Information Engineering and Systems Symposium in Paris. It was an interesting meeting with a high variety of papers. And being in Paris for a couple of days was not bad either ;). You can see the slides below I used during the symposium.


I have learned a lot from this symposium; in a nutshell I have learned that usability is very important, because there are a lot of users in healthcare that are "forced" to use health information systems. A system should be easy to use, because not every user is a computer scientist, but can be a laymen in computer skill terms. For example: A doctor may be an expert in the field of neurosurgeon, that doesn't make the neurosurgeon an expert in using an information system. This system can enhance the skills of an expert by providing support in the right way. This is summarized by the following figure.

Reproduced image from presentation of Gerry Douglas

Gerry Douglas had a real eye-opening presentation about a very simple-to-use patient registration system in a large hospital in Malawi. He developed a system where the users were trained within 1 week, and the registrations really improved. From no system or archive at all (an old sea-container randomly filled with paper is not an archive) to a patient registration system only using touchscreen, laserprinters, and a barcode scanner.

This are the slides used during the presentation:

Van Gorp et al FHIES2012 from wdalinghaus