Health Informatics Group

eHealth and Patient Safety

The era of patients’ notes as a sheaf of papers in a file is fast coming to a close – the challenge is to replace traditional systems for monitoring patient pathways with technologies that simultaneously comply with data-safety regulations, provide audit data, improve patient safety, and increase the efficiency of clinical practice.

Image: Salzburg Research
Image: Salzburg Research

There is great scope for improving the medical care business with use of computer technologies. Digitisation of medical records makes it far easier for doctors to access relevant and up to date medical information on a patient from anywhere, without the need for paper copies – this improves legibility and removes the time needed to request medical files. Digitising the data also makes it easier to analyse the files to find trends. Other eHealth technologies include telemedicine, which provides doctor-patient contact from a distance by connecting them using video interviews and remote monitoring systems.

Recent Publications

Shaheen, Q, Toniolo, A & Kuster Filipe Bowles, J 2021, Argumentation-based explanations of multimorbidity treatment plans. in T Uchiya, Q Bai & IM Maestre (eds), PRIMA 2020: Principles and Practice of Multi-Agent Systems: 23rd International Conference, Nagoya, Japan, November 18–20, 2020, Proceedings. Lecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics), vol. 12568 LNCS, Springer, Cham, pp. 394-402, 23rd International Conference on Principles and Practice of Multi-Agent Systems, PRIMA 2020, 18/11/20. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-69322-0_29

Ford, E, Boyd, A, K. F. Bowles, J, Havard, A, Aldridge, R, Curcin, V, Greiver, M, Harron, K, Katikireddi, V, Rodgers, S & Sperrin, M 2019, ‘Our data, our society, our health: a vision for inclusive and transparent health data science in the United Kingdom and beyond‘, Learning Health Systems, vol. 3, no. 3, e10191. https://doi.org/10.1002/lrh2.10191

Janjic, V, Bowles, J, Belk, M & Pitsillides, A 2019, Security and privacy of medical data: challenges for next-generation patient-centric healthcare systems. in ACM UMAP 2019 Adjunct – Adjunct Publication of the 27th Conference on User Modeling, Adaptation and Personalization. Association for Computing Machinery, Inc, New York, pp. 213-214, 27th ACM International Conference on User Modeling, Adaptation and Personalization, UMAP 2019, Larnaca, Cyprus, 9/06/19. https://doi.org/10.1145/3314183.3326364