eHealth4all@EU

The course Learning Healthcare in Action: Clinical Data Analytics started with a two-day kick-off on June 17^th and 18^th, 2021. 17 students and doctoral candidates from Germany, Finland, Portugal and the USA are taking part in the online course, which will run until August 25^th. The second course on Data Protection & Security will then start in September. Further information will follow soon. 

This workshop was organised and presented by

Ursula Hübner and Nicole Egbert from the University of Applied Sciences Osnabrück, Germany

Kaija Saranto and Ulla-Mari Kinnunen from the University of Eastern Finland, Kuopio, Finland and

Pedro Marques from the University of Porto, Portugal.

Building on existing health informatics educational recommendations (IMIA, TIGER etc.) this workshop presented results of the ERASMUS project eHealth4all@eu that focused on the verification of these recommendations. A verification performed through the lens of experts from the field, such as physicians, nurses, physiotherapists, managers and informaticians, is necessary to adjust the recommendations that were mainly developed in the academic arena. However, it is the healthcare workforce that is confronted with the digital tools and needs to be trained and upskilled regarding health informatics.

The developments are embedded in the rich tradition of EFMI’s and IMIA’s activities in the educational area which was presented by John Mantas from the University of Athens.

eHealth4all@eu, which aims to develop, implement and evaluate interprofessional courses for graduate students from all different health professions, utilizes an educational pipeline for the course development. This pipeline starts with recommendations rooted in the TIGER initiative (Technology Informatics Guiding Education Reform), updates these recommendations through a scoping review of relevant educational publications, verifies these findings in focus group interviews before defining the pedagogical methods, the learning platform and the syllabus.

This workshop concentrated on the finding from the focus group discussions that were conducted in the three partner countries, i.e. Finland (findings presented by Ulla-Mari Kinnunen), Germany (findings presented by Nicole Egbert) and Portugal (findings presented by Pedro Marques). The findings were presented and summarized by Kaija Saranto.

The findings showed that the initial plans of the consortium to develop, implement and evaluated courses in the fields of

• data protection and security,
• interoperability,
• data analytics,
• innovation and entrepreneurship,
• leadership and governance and finally
• ethical and legal issues

met the requirements of the experts from the field. Some topics, e.g. data analytics, were highlighted only in one or two countries revealing some country specific views.

There was an interesting discussion, which was moderated by Ursula Hübner und Kaija Saranto, about the need to include health informatics ethics in the curricula of health professionals due to the upcoming AI based solutions and the steadily increasing digital outreach to patients. Both fields raised ethical questions that go beyond the classic biomedical ethics discourse. Furthermore, the question was raised how to increase the medical and health informatics workload in the curricula of physicians and nurses that are already crowded.

As the workshop lasted only 60 minutes, 15 minutes for the discussion were not enough to share all opinions and viewpoints. The discussion also revealed that there is a great interest in educational topics which matches the current IMIA activities to update its educational recommendations in biomedical and health informatics.

The first results of the project were presented at the EFMI 2020 Special Topic Conference, that was held as an electronic conference in November the 26^th - 27^th, 2020. As part of this conference, we held a workshop entitled "TIGER goes ERASMUS: Implementing Problem Based Inter-Professional Health Informatics Education".

The following topics were presented from our project team: 

• eHealth4all@EU Project Overview (Ursula Hübner, Osnabrück University of Applied Sciences)
• Overview of health informatics education (Ulla-Mari Kinnunen, University of Eastern Finland)
• Online health informatics problem based learning (Nicole Egbert, Osnabrück University of Applied Sciences)
• Overview learning platforms and tools (Pedro Marques & Ricardo Correia, University of Porto)

On 30.01.2020 the kick-off meeting took place in winterly Kuopio (Finland).