With the objective to ensure a greater engagement of end-users, nurses, in the development of digital health solutions, the EFN is now part of two EU-funded projects, under H2020, Smart4Health and InteropEHRate, working to empower the citizen and unlock health data from local silos, using a bottom-up approach for EHR Interoperability.
The first project, Smart4Health – Citizen-Centred EU-EHR Exchange for Personalised Health, is coordinated by UNINOVA (Instituto de Desenvolvimento de Novas Tecnologias (Portugal), and will develop, test and validate a platform prototype for the Smart4Health citizen-centred health record EU-EHR exchange.
Another project that includes EFN contribution is Interoperable EHRs at user edge – InteropEHRate – Coordinated by Engineering Ingegneria Informatica (ENG – Italy). The aim of this project is to provide European citizens with a complete view of their health history, shareable with health operators and researchers.
This will be an exciting work for EFN members as the Commission launched the consultation on a roadmap on European Electronic Health Record (EHR) Exchange Format. This work perfectly fit within the nursing profession work on integrated care and continuity of care, in which frontline nurses play a central role.
The EFN role as end-user partner offers a wide policy expertise in Co-creation: Integrated care and the digital tools deployed should empower patients and frontline nurses, moving towards an ecosystem based on proactive/empowered health-aware patient/citizen. To this purpose, we need the end-user engaging in co-creation, making sure the digital/data revolution supports and facilitates the shift towards a resilient and integrated health and social ecosystem. The end-user codesigning capacity will be key to transform systems and to make digitalisation deployable.
Furthermore, it will be key to create ‘fit-for purpose’ solutions in order to establish an integrated health and social care system and moving care to the community. Requirements and mechanisms co-designed with the end-user are key to ensure the utility and suitability of the developed solutions. The EFN plays an important role in the requirement phase by providing the consortium with the nurses’ views and expertise in: making a solution fit-for-purpose so the upscaled practice leads to better outcomes. The EFN is in a key position to ensure that the development of any ecosystem is in line with the EU, national & local requirements, by engaging nursing leaders and researchers.
All comes down to TRUST! Citizen and patient’ trust is a central concept in developing digital tools requiring data sharing, therefore, patients and healthcare professionals, in particular nurses, should be more involved in the data sharing governance, with the end-users always at the centre of the process. Due to the close relation nurses develop with the patients, families and informal carers, nurses are ideally placed to create trust from citizens towards digitalisation.