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Health kiosks are basically a low-threshold opportunity for communication between citizens and other actors in the healthcare system as well as for information on health-related issues. The aim of the study was to record the use of health kiosks in pharmacies by means of a quantitative long-term survey and to determine the reasons for (non-)use by means of a qualitative in-depth analysis. Overall, usage parameters were recorded over 25 months in log files of up to 145 pharmacies. In addition, 92 customers of four high-usage pharmacies were interviewed in qualitative short interviews regarding the reasons for use or non-use. The results of the long-term study showed that the health kiosks were used 1–2 times a day at best, but more likely only 1–2 times a week. The reasons for non-use were due to the interaction of different factors, including accessibility and usefulness, but also the social environment. It can be concluded that identifying the reasons for (non-)use is an important step towards allowing the potential of health kiosks to unfold if they are to be used in a targeted manner within the framework of the digitalisation strategy of the Federal Ministry of Health.

Introduction: Handovers are a central process for ensuring information continuity in patient care and, therefore, possess a major influence on patient safety as errors due to poor handovers can lead to life-threatening events. Education to improve handovers and ensure safe patient care can be supported by using critical incident reporting systems (CIRS). The aim of the study is to perform a content analysis of a national CIRS-database with regard to identifying adverse events in handovers situations and to derive competencies for the development of continuing education from these findings.Methods: A meta model served as a research framework to merge the empirical findings with the London protocol of analysing critical events and the Canadian framework of safety competencies. Relevant cases to be investigated were searched in a freely accessible German CIRS database. Results: A total of 253 case descriptions were found and analysed. Team factors emerged as the most frequently reported influencing factors following the analysis of the London protocol. Communication errors and missing information as well as a lack of appropriate standards and processes appeared to be the main reasons for critical events to occur. Most of the events happened in units involving surgery and intensive care. A mapping of patient safety competences with the reasons for critical events was conducted in order to determine the practical, concrete and handover related competencies. Conclusion: Data from a CIRS database and theoretical frameworks can be combined to extract meaningful information about patient safety risks in handover situations. The results are useful for developing curricula to improve handovers based on patient safety competencies.

Background: Improper information transmission can lead to compromised patient safety and quality of life when patients are transferred from one setting to another. Electronic instruments may improve this situation, however, they are rarely used. Objective: The aim of this study therefore was to investigate the technical and organizational feasibility, usability, usefulness and completeness of an electronic instrument that is based on the German HL7 CDA standard for eNursing Summaries.Materials and methods: To this end, a test health telematics infrastructure, which included the German electronic health card, was established and nursing summary application was developed that allowed summary documents to be communicated between a hospital and a nursing home. The users were asked to evaluate the usability of the nursing summary application as well as to compare the usefulness and completeness of electronically and paper transmitted information.Results: This study demonstrated the feasibility of implementing an electronic nursing summary application that was based on the German HL7 CDA standard eNursing Summary and that was integrated in a test health telematics infrastructure. It could also be shown that the users rated this application as usable and that electronically supported patient transfers were superior to paper based ones. The use of the German electronic health card was regarded as a barrier by the users.Discussion: This study emphasizes the feasibility, relevance and barriers of electronically supported transfers of patients with nursing needs. Nurses working in hospitals and long-term care can integrate an application based on the HL7 CDA Standard ePfgebericht into their working processes and get better and more complete information. To ensure continuity of care in a sustainable manner in the future, the German HL7 CDA based eNursing Summary standard should become part of the German telematics infrastructure.

The increasing availability of information and communication technology in healthcare requires nursing professionals to possess competencies for exploiting the pertinent systems and methods. Against this background, the German GMDS working group Nursing Informatics, the Austrian Society for Nursing Informatics (ÖGPI) and the Swiss Interest Group for Nursing Informatics (IGPI) decided to release joint recommendations for core competency areas in Nursing Informatics. Based on an iterative multi-methods approach that included a great number of experts in the field from Austria, Germany and Switzerland, a 24 core competency areas were identified and rated regarding their relevance for five professional roles of nurses. This is the first catalogue of recommendations for core competency areas in Nursing Informatics for the three countries. It relies on sound scientific methods and empirical relevance ratings. These recommendations address all persons engaged in education, training, studying and continuing education in the field of nursing.

Digitalization in healthcare and the increasing availability of data demand data literacy competences of nurses and other healthcare professionals including technical, ethical and communication skills. The international Spring School 2023 "Information in Healthcare - From Date to Knowledge" aimed at these competences covering interoperability, data protection and security, data analytics and ethical issues. These topics were embedded in the overall case of data-driven quality improvement for diabetes patients in a region. The curriculum includes an online preparation-phase and a five-days attendance week, incorporating problem-based and group work approaches. According to the student's evaluation, the awareness of the importance of the topics was raised and theoretical as well as practical application skills were improved. The Spring School enhanced data literacy competences, critical thinking, problem-solving, interprofessional und intercultural skills among healthcare professionals. Such course offering can contribute to meeting the increasing challenges of digitalization in healthcare. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this European interprofessional Health Informatics (HI) Summer School was (i) to make advanced healthcare students familiar with what HI can offer in terms of knowledge development for patient care and (ii) to give them an idea about the underlying technical and legal mechanisms. According to the students' evaluation, interprofessional education was very well received, problem-based learning focussing on cases was rated positively and the learning goals were met. However, it was criticised that the online material provided was rather detailed and comprehensive and could have been a bit overcharging for beginners. These drawbacks were obviously compensated by the positive experience of working in international and interprofessional groups and a generally welcoming environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While Nursing Informatics competencies seem essential for the daily work of nurses, they are not formally integrated into nursing education in Austria, Germany and Switzerland, nor are there any national educational recommendations. The aim of this paper is to show how such recommendations can be developed, what competency areas are most relevant in the three countries and how the recommendations can be implemented in practice. To this end, a triple iterative procedure was proposed and applied starting with national health informatics recommendations for other professionals, matching and enriching these findings with topics from the international literature and finally validating them in an expert survey with 87 experts and in focus group sessions. Out of the 24 compiled competency areas, the relevance ratings of the following four recommended areas achieved values above 90%: nursing documentation (including terminologies), principles of nursing informatics, data protection and security, and quality assurance and quality management. As there were no significant differences between the three countries, these findings laid the foundation of the DACH Recommendations of Nursing Informatics as joint German (D), Austrian (A), and Swiss (CH) recommendations in Nursing Informatics. The methodology proposed has been utilized internationally, which demonstrates the added value of this study also outside the confines of Austria, Germany, Switzerland. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Personal health records (PHR) are instruments to compile, store and present health and wellness related data digitally with proven effects on selfmanagement of diseases. The aim of this study was to investigate whether there were differences in the intention to use (ITU) and perceived usefulness (PU) of two technologies allowing users to access the PHR, i.e. a kiosk system and a smart phone based app (access as usual). The study also aimed at modelling ITU and PU with multiple linear regressions. A total of 46 subject participated in the study who were randomly assigned to one of the two experimental groups (nkiosk= 22; napp=24). The task for both groups was to digitise their "Medikationsplan" (medical record) and upload it to the PHR. There was no significant difference in ITU and PU between the two technologies. ITU could only be significantly explained by PU (R²=.55, p<0.001), while PU was determined by perceived ease of use and psychological factors (R²=.64, p<0.001). Severity of disease did not play any significant role. The German "Terminservice- und Versorgungsgesetz" underpins the importance and timeliness of this study. The assumption that both - the publicly accessible kiosk and the app - are equally acceptable for people of different gender, age and technology background demonstrates the opportunity to master a potential digital divide among the population and allows users to get access to their PHR in multiple ways. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Informatics competencies of the health care workforce must meet the requirements of inter-professional process and outcome oriented provision of care. In order to help nursing education transform accordingly, the TIGER Initiative deployed an international survey, with participation from 21 countries, to evaluate and prioritise a broad list of core competencies for nurses in five domains: 1) nursing management, 2) information technology (IT) management in nursing, 3) interprofessional coordination of care, 4) quality management, and 5) clinical nursing. Informatics core competencies were found highly important for all domains. In addition, this project compiled eight national cases studies from Austria, Finland, Germany, Ireland, New Zealand, the Philippines, Portugal, and Switzerland that reflected the country specific perspective. These findings will lead us to an international framework of informatics recommendations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The increasing importance of IT in nursing requires educational measures to support its meaningful application. However, many countries do not yet have national recommendations for nursing informatics competencies. We thus developed an iterative triple methodology to yield validated and country specific recommendations for informatics core competencies in nursing. We identified relevant competencies from national sources (step 1), matched and enriched these with input from the international literature (step 2) and fed the resulting 24 core competencies into a survey (120 invited experts from which 87 responded) and two focus group sessions with a total of 48 experts (steps 3a/3b). The subsequent focus group sessions confirmed and expanded the findings. As a result, we were able to define role specific informatics core competencies for three countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article describes an analysis of the use of e-learning to improve the learning transfer to practice in continuing education. Therefore an elearning offer has been developed as a part between two attendance periods of a training course in the field of Ambient Assisted Living (AAL). All participants of the course were free to use the e-learning offer. After the end of the e-learning part we compared the e-learning users to the other participants. Using an online questionnaire we explored if there are differences in the activities in the field AAL after the training course. The results show that e-learning is beneficial especially for communication processes. Due to the fact that the possibility to talk about the learning content is an essential factor for the learning transfer, e-learning can improve the learning success. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this European interprofessional Health Informatics (HI) Summer School was (i) to make advanced healthcare students familiar with what HI can offer in terms of knowledge development for patient care and (ii) to give them an idea about the underlying technical and legal mechanisms. According to the students' evaluation, interprofessional education was very well received, problem-based learning focussing on cases was rated positively and the learning goals were met. However, it was criticised that the online material provided was rather detailed and comprehensive and could have been a bit overcharging for beginners. These drawbacks were obviously compensated by the positive experience of working in international and interprofessional groups and a generally welcoming environment.

Communication deficits belong to the most frequent errors in patient handovers calling upon specialized training approaches to be implemented. This study aims to harness problem-based learning (PBL) methods in handover education and evaluated the learning process. A digitally enabled PBL course was developed and implemented at Klinikum Osnabrück from which eight nurses participated in the course. They agreed on the stimulating effect of the setting regarding self-directed learning and on the potential to translate the new knowledge and skills into the daily clinical practice. In conclusion, the findings are promising that a digitally enabled PBL course is a suitable learning format for handover education.

This paper describes the methodology and developments towards the TIGER International Recommendation Framework of Core Competencies in Health Informatics 2.0. This Framework is meant to augment the scope from nursing towards a series of six other professional roles, i.e. direct patient care, health information management, executives, chief information officers, engineers and health IT specialists and researchers and educators. Health informatics core competency areas were compiled from various sources that had integrated the literature and were grouped into consistent clusters. The relevance of these core competency areas was rated in a survey by 718 professional experts from 51 countries. Furthermore, 22 local case studies illustrated the competencies and gave insight into examples of local educational practice. The Framework contributes to the overall discourse on how to shape health informatics education to improve quality and safety of care by enabling useful and successful health information systems.

Although national eHealth strategies have existed now for more than a decade in many countries, they have been implemented with varying success. In Germany, the eHealth strategy so far has resulted in a roll out of electronic health cards for all citizens in the statutory health insurance, but in no clinically meaningful IT-applications. The aim of this study was to test the technical and organisation feasibility, usability, and utility of an eDischarge application embedded into a laboratory Health Telematics Infrastructure (TI). The tests embraced the exchange of eDischarge summaries based on the multiprofessional HL7 eNursing Summary standard between a municipal hospital and a nursing home. All in all, 36 transmissions of electronic discharge documents took place. They demonstrated the technical-organisation feasibility and resulted in moderate usability ratings. A comparison between eDischarge and paper-based summaries hinted at higher ratings of utility and information completeness for eDischarges. Despite problems with handling the electronic health card, the proof-of-concept for the first clinically meaningful IT-application in the German Health TI could be regarded as successful.

Hospital characteristics that facilitate IT adoption have been described by the literature extensively, however with controversial results. The aim of this study therefore is to draw a set of the most important variables from previous studies and include them in a combined analysis for testing their contribution as single factors and their interactions. Total number of IT systems installed and number of clinical IT systems in the hospital were used as criterion variables. Data from a national survey of German hospitals served as basis. Based on a stepwise multiple regression analysis four variables were identified to significantly explain the degree of IT adoption (60% explained variance): 1) hospital size, 2) IT department, 3) reference customer and 4) ownership (private vs. public). Our results replicate previous findings with regard to hospital size and ownership. In addition our study emphasizes the importance of a reliable internal structure for IT projects (existence of an IT department) and the culture of testing and installing most recent IT products (being a reference customer). None of the interactions between factors was significant.