What is your project about?

It is about digitalization of healthcare, with a managerial perspective. Our discipline is called operations management and I am particularly focusing on how people make the process of patient treatment more efficient. My project´s aim is to look at how the digitalization is changing the way doctors and nurses, and other people in healthcare, actually work.

Digitalization is a broad field; Therefore, I am narrowing it down to information and technology (IT). The technologies I am looking for are services like distance monitoring, which means that patients can share their health data, such as blood sugar and blood pressure, on an app on their phone or tablet. In this way they can self-report and answer recurring questions from doctors and nurses without leaving their home.

Another aspect of my project is to look at how doctors and nurses might need to change the way they work in order for the digital patient monitoring to work properly. Maybe they need a new set of skills or we need new rules for how the data is treated, to ensure that the patients get the treatment that they need.

Why did you want to work with this specific topic?

It started with my master’s in Quality and Operations Management, where my thesis was part of an EU project about eHealth. I was working with technology for elderly people with dementia, helping them to stay safe in their own home instead of moving to a health care institution. After a year of following this project quite closely, I really wanted to work with digitalization of health care.

Very often the focus in this field is only on the technology and not the people. As the technologies cannot be activated by themselves, we need to focus on the people too. Both the ones who design the technology and the ones who use it. I found this very interesting, so this PhD project was a very good match for me.

Do you have a target audience?

I would say that the people I am addressing are managers of hospitals and that I am taking the view of doctors and nurses. So, I am following the activities of doctors and nurses and take their perspective on digitalization and then I try to communicate it to the top management.

What is the most challenging part of your project?

I have not seen many studies that have taken my perspective. This might be because someone already tried to do this but failed, or it can be because nobody has thought of researching this perspective yet. So, one of my main challenges so far is the lack of literature on the topic. At least I have not found it yet.

What would you say is the goal of your project?

My project is very qualitative. Therefore, I am not hoping to say anything specific about improvements in numbers etc. What I want is to develop some theories that can explain why digitalization works or why it does not work, when it comes to the relationship between digitalization and healthcare. So, I would say my goal is to make a framework for people to use before they make the decisions of whether they want to use this technology or not.