Accepted for/Published in: Journal of Medical Internet Research
Date Submitted: Oct 28, 2024
Open Peer Review Period: Nov 1, 2024 - Dec 27, 2024
Date Accepted: Dec 19, 2024
(closed for review but you can still tweet)
Warning: This is an author submission that is not peer-reviewed or edited. Preprints - unless they show as "accepted" - should not be relied on to guide clinical practice or health-related behavior and should not be reported in news media as established information.
Empowering Healthcare Actors to Contribute to the Implementation of Health Data Integration Platforms: A Retrospective of the medEmotion Project
ABSTRACT
Background:
Health data integration platforms are vital to drive collaborative, interdisciplinary medical research projects. Developing such a platform requires input from different stakeholders. Managing these stakeholders and steering platform development is challenging, misaligning the platform to the partners’ strategies might lead to a low acceptance of the final platform.
Objective:
We present the medEmotion project, a collaborative effort between seven partners from healthcare, academia and industry to develop a health data integration platform for the region of Limburg in Belgium. We focus on the development process and stakeholder engagement, aiming to give practical advice for similar future efforts based on our reflections on medEmotion.
Methods:
We introduce Personas to paraphrase different roles that stakeholders take and Demonstrators that summarise personas’ requirements with respect to the platform. Both the personas and the demonstrators serve two purposes. First, they are used to define technical requirements for the medEmotion platform. Second, they represent a communication vehicle that simplifies discussions between all stakeholders.
Results:
Based on the personas and demonstrators, we present the medEmotion platform based on components from the Microsoft Azure cloud. The demonstrators serve as use cases that showcase the utility of the platform. We reflect on the development process of medEmotion and distil takeaway messages that will be helpful for future projects.
Conclusions:
Investing in community building, stakeholder engagement, and education is vital to building an ecosystem for a health data integration platform. Instead of academic-led projects, the healthcare providers themselves ideally drive collaboration among healthcare providers. The providers are best positioned to address hospital-specific requirements, while academics take a neutral mediator role. This also includes the Ideation Phase, where it is vital to ensure the involvement of all stakeholders. Finally, balancing innovation with implementation is key to developing an innovative yet sustainable health data integration platform.
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Copyright
© The authors. All rights reserved. This is a privileged document currently under peer-review/community review (or an accepted/rejected manuscript). Authors have provided JMIR Publications with an exclusive license to publish this preprint on it's website for review and ahead-of-print citation purposes only. While the final peer-reviewed paper may be licensed under a cc-by license on publication, at this stage authors and publisher expressively prohibit redistribution of this draft paper other than for review purposes.