Covid-19 in Norway
It’s Friday evening after a week where the Norwegian society has been impacted in dramatic ways because of a extremely small organism with a huge apetitt for growth.
Yesterday all schools where closed. People who can work at home does so. And the healthcare services prepare for a huge amount of sick people. In Norway, as elsewhere, intensive beds are a limited resource. The hospitals has to prepare for lots of patients. As part of this the interest for the Covid-19 application has raised.
Current status for the deployment:
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One hospital, Diakonhjemmet Hospital, registered the first patients on Wednesday. It was used at a ward for risk assessment of admitted patients. They are also planning to use the application at the acute ward.
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The northern and western region are installing the application in test. They set up the application and prepare it as a readiness for the days to come. In total they are evaluating if they will use the application at 8 hospitals. We all know how much effort it will take to introduce a new application into a workflow with hundreds of employees, and at the same time reorganizing the wards and personell to prepare for the pandemic.
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The biggest health region in Norway, Helse Sør-Øst, is currently using our openEHR platform at one hospital, Oslo University Hospital. They want to test the application and I assume they will install in test early next week.
A very interesting story is the following:
Our company owns a system called FastTrak. It’s a great software used in some of the municipalities, for some quality registries at the hospitals and some national registries. I have admired their work for many years though it’s not based on openEHR.
What we did the last week was to adopt the openEHR clinical models we developed and apply them into FastTrak. At Wednesday we did a coordinated demonstration of our openEHR solution and FastTrak. We are currently deploying both systems to all our customers in secondary care.
I find it so appealing to see the knowledge and competence from our openEHR community being applied into other systems and speeding up the development and deployment process.
The last days I have also seen tweets with screenshots from other applications who build on the models developed by @ian.mcnicoll and the community. It so nice.
The guidelines changes somehow from day to day. We still think the inital design and architecture covers the needs. We deliver a flexible application with three forms and dataelements to display the status of the processes. Those artifacts can be used in different ways at our customers depending on the needs. Some use-cases so far discovered are:
- Risk assessment in the acute ward
- Daily risk assessment based on symptoms at a ordinary ward
- Contact tracing performed by infection team. The data recorded as part of the contact tracing might be sensitive. Our customers tend to set this up in an “access-group” for only a small number of personells.
- Retrospective follow up on outpatient stays. This use-case is not so common anymore since hospitals cut down on all their elective activity.
The next days and weeks will be very interesting. We want to find out if the measures implemented by the authorities work. The situation might change for better or worse. We, as a e-health community, will have to adapt to the changes and try our best to provide the best possible systems for our beloved health care workers.
Wash your hands and keep up the good work!!!