One of the new healthcare innovations that are called to change the health landscape for healthcare professionals and patients equally is the cross-border interoperable Electronic Health Records (EHR). The EFN strongly believes in the power of change of EHR, and hence as joined as an official partner the InteropEHRate project.
The last meeting of this project took place in the premises of the University of Piraeus, Greece, on 25-27 September 2019. The EFN was present there, representing the nursing profession. During the meeting, partners discussed what the latest developments on the project are. These relate to the further development and fine-tuning of the project’s three scenarios, implementing the end-user input, as well as to the IT-related developments that have been achieved in the EHR app (in all its versions, for patients and healthcare professionals alike). The EHR app, as it is now, has fully operating demos from the view of patients as well as from the view of healthcare professionals. That is, these two can now exchange health data only using their phone devices and without a wired connection. IT partners are also working with libraries of health terms, to ensure that the app can translate health data to all EU languages instantaneously. Finally, partners also made advancements in terms of dissemination at the EU level and presented their latest achievements. The EFN has been very active in this latter field, advertising the project across EU-related events, homepages, and social media.
End-user engagement and co-design are key ingredients for successful digitization in healthcare. Without these two, innovation will continue being developed in silos in which technical developers and nurses/healthcare professionals do not speak “the same language”, resulting in new digital tools that do not address the real needs of frontline healthcare professionals or that, even worse, increase their workload rather than decreasing it.
The EFN’s role in this project relates to providing end-user input, representing the views and needs of the nursing profession, and dissemination at the European level. There is a full list of project partners, together with a short description with their mission, online. The coordinator is Engineering Ingegneria Informatica (Italy).