Dignity Care – project update March 2023

To all partners in the Dignity Care project. Here is an update on our project.

VT dashboard. Illustration by Eggs Design

Working towards RCT start-up

We are working hard to be ready to start our study, which is a randomized controlled trial (RCT) in the fall of 2023.

Patient stories: Thank you to all our patient partners who have contributed with both patient records and their own experiences. We are now working on extracting good test situations from their stories. We call these "scenarios". We plan to use them as "tasks" when we test whether the DigiTeam tool helps healthcare workers to better solve challenges. We are also trying to recruit two new patients from our partners in the Patient-centered healthcare team.

The prototype for our DigiTeam tool is not yet complete, but we are working on different solutions to ensure its success. We have seen in recent trials that the fact that the DigiTeam tool provides a good and quick overview of the patient's history is a key feature. We are working to find a solution that has secure login for sensitive data. Our starting point is a proprietary tool that provides a good overview of complex patient pathways but lacks some other functionality. We are in dialog with several of our partners to find solutions for the parts we do not yet have in place.

New PhD candidates

We have two new PhD candidates, Amanda Emén and Marte Broks, who will help to strengthen our work in Dignity Care. They will work on setting up and interpreting the results from the RCT study.

Academic partners

The project has a group of international experts with whom we meet annually to get good input for our study. We received input on various aspects of research projects that a research project must consider if they are to collaborate with commercial actors. We also received feedback on the study design, including a suggestion to use the framework of Paul R. Carlies[1] to categorize our tasks.

Networking

We organize professional meetings on the first Friday of the month where relevant speakers present their work.

In December and February, we held two interesting professional meetings with our partners Digital Treatment and Self-Management Plans (DBEP) and Aidn. We are particularly pleased to see that both DBEP and Aidn have adopted many of the same ideas that we have, and that they are testing these ideas with a wider range of users than we are able to. We see that the patient's goals and joint plans to address the patient's challenges are in place.

If you would like an invitation to the professional meetings, please send an email to email hidden; JavaScript is required.