Keeping an eye on the context: participatory development of eHealth to support clinical practice

In her thesis titled: ‘Keeping an eye on the context: Participatory development of eHealth to support clinical practice’, Jobke Wentzel describes the approach she followed to support clinical practice regarding antimicrobial use and patient safety. eHealth, the use of information and communication technology, holds a great potential in timely supporting health care workers with information at the bed-side or during regular tasks. In the research supporting this thesis, reasons for not benefitting from this eHealth potential were uncovered. Most importantly, information systems were found to be ill-fitted to the actual clinical practice and HCW tasks: they are expert instead of practice driven. By applying a human-centered design approach, following the CeHRes roadmap, an antibiotic information application for nurses was developed and tested. During this development, both the target group (nurses) as other stakeholders (e.g., pharmacists, microbiology experts) were involved during iterative development cycles.The studies showed that keeping an eye on the context, and ensuring it matches information needs and work practice, results in better task support and more efficient information use. Moreover, the applied methodology revealed insights into antibiotic-related tasks and responsibilities, beyond the reach of the application itself. In this sense, developing an eHealth application was not a goal in itself. It was a means to improving and advancing healthcare and patient safety.