Experiences of Digitalized Healthcare
Healthcare digitalization represents a key strategy for addressing staff resource shortages, improving care quality, increasing patient empowerment, and fostering sustainability at the societal level by decreasing healthcare costs. New technologies, including patient portals and wearable devices, can improve the provision of accessible and equitable services. Additionally, artificial intelligence (AI) solutions are expected to enhance service efficiency, improve clinical performance, and mitigate staff burnout.
Despite significant investments in development work, digital solutions have not met expectations regarding digital health service accessibility, electronic health record usability, and AI application accuracy. Instead, new digital solutions are changing professionals' work in an undesirable way and creating new competency requirements for clinicians, patients, and other citizens. One approach to researching the impacts of digitalization in healthcare is through personal experiences. Over the past few years, health informatics researchers have focused more on user experience at the individual, organizational, and societal levels.
The event 鈥Experiences of digitalized healthcare鈥, organized by an international consortium of faculty, will explore emerging digital health challenges and propose a path forward. Our goal with this event is to identify challenges and contradictions that can be addressed through collaborative research, personalized experiences, and a human-centric approach. We examine experiences of digitalized healthcare from various stakeholder perspectives:
- Patients鈥 and caregivers鈥 experiences: How do patients and caregivers perceive digital solutions? What are the benefits from their perspective, particularly in terms of accessibility, usability, and long-term user experience?
- Healthcare professionals鈥 experiences: What are their experiences adapting and utilizing health information systems? How does digitalization affect organizational workflows and work well-being? What new competencies are required?
- Social and organizational perspectives: What theories, models, and frameworks can be used to study experiences from social and organizational perspectives? What kinds of experiences are related to digital health capabilities?
- Design perspective: How do we support human-centered design of digital health technologies that benefit diverse end-user groups, including clinicians, patients living with chronic diseases, individuals in vulnerable situations, and marginalized populations?
- Health authorities' perspective
The event includes:
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A PhD course for students pursuing PhD studies on related topics (June 2-4, from 9:00 AM to 4:30 PM)
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Open seminar talks given by international faculty for a wider audience (June 2, from 10:00 AM to 12:30 PM, and June 3-4, from 9:00 AM to 12:30 PM)
PhD course
The PhD course aims to support the progress of postgraduate studies and research, foster networking opportunities, develop collaborative and international teamwork skills, and strengthen leadership capabilities.
- Academic objectives to support PhD research:
- Learn to position one's own research in the broader international research field
- Learn and exchange ideas on innovative theoretical frameworks and methods
- Present and discuss one's own PhD research topic with international researchers and receive feedback from them related to one's own research work
- Provide feedback on other PhD students鈥 research
- Network with international experts and other PhD students, and learn to work with researchers from different backgrounds to address a given research issue
- Content-related learning objectives:
- Get acquainted with human-centered design processes and methods for designing and evaluating digital health solutions
- Become familiar with methods and approaches for studying experiences of digitalized healthcare from personalized, social, and organizational perspectives
- Identify challenges and future opportunities for researching experiences in healthcare contexts
- Pre-course session (virtual) three weeks before the event (May 12th)
- Live PhD course; three-day seminar (June 2-4), including:
- Student presentations (June 3, afternoon)
- Seminar talks by faculty (June 2-4)
- Workshops (June 2 and June 4)
- Poster session (June 2)
- Other collaborative activities
- Schedule: 12.5.-4.6.2026
- Language of instructions and studies: English
- Content: See event description
- Assessment methods and criteria:
- Participation in the course sessions, poster & presentation of PhD thesis research, portfolio
- Grading: Pass / Fail
- Workload: 3 ETCS (about 80 hours in total):
- Pre-course session (6 hours)
- Readings (16 hours)
- PhD poster & presentation (preparation) (20 hours)
- Live PhD course attendance (3 x 8 = 24 hours)
- Reflections and portfolio (10 hours)
- Study materials: Will be announced separately
- Prerequisities:The PhD course is designed for graduate students in health informatics or related fields, including health information science, health systems engineering, implementation science, computer science, artificial intelligence, human factors and ergonomics, human-computer interaction, patient safety, and sociotechnical anthropology.
- Contact information for the course: Johanna Viitanen, Assistant Professor, Aalto University ( johanna.viitanen@aalto.fi)
- Johanna Viitanen, Assistant Professor, Human-Centred Health Informatics research group, Department of Computer Science, Aalto University
- Blake Lesselroth, Associate Professor, Depts of Med Inform and Internal Med, University of Oklahoma, Oklahoma, United States
- Helen Monkman, Associate Professor, School of Health Information Science, University of Victoria, British Columbia, Canada
- Juell Homco, Assistant Professor, Department of Medical Informatics, University of Oklahoma, Oklahoma, United States
- Linda Dusseljee-Peute, Associate Professor, Department of Medical Informatics, Amsterdam University Medical Center, Netherlands
- Romaric Marcilly, Senior Researcher, METRICS and Clinical Investigation Centre for Innovative Technology, University of Lille - Lille Hospital, France
More information available soon
Faculty
