Austria, National Coordinator, Mrs Gertrud Fritz.
Exchange Participants – Ewa Jasinska, Poland, Sanita Kandele, Latvia, Salla Koivunen, Finland, Jose Antonio Reinaldo, Spain, Eveline Scheve, Netherlands and Carina Schürmann, Germany.
They cited national, regional and local innovation projects.
The national innovation project was an integrated model for health information. This consisted of Elga, TEWEB, A-IQI and Kliniksuche.
Elga is an informational personal highway to patients’ data for professionals and citizens. It provides medical information whenever and wherever needed
TEWEB is a medical service which uses a telephone to guide patients to the best point of service. It is driven by the stakeholders – the Ministry of Health and Women, Social Insurances, Federal States: Vorarlberg, Vienna, Lower Austria. The service is free and available 24 hours a day, and at weekends and holidays
A-IQI are Austrian quality indicators, providing peer reviewing and transparent quality data in a portal for patients/citizens. It provides information on mortality and complications, different quality indicators and outcomes, process indicators and surgical techniques used.
Kliniksuche.at is a portal for patients and citizens to find information on the hospitals and compare them.
They said that these innovations facilitated patient empowerment through transparent information. They were a unique combination of different tools such as the telephone portal for patient data and portals for patient information about the quality of the hospitals. They supported a patient focused health care system and was orientated to patient safety.
Their regional innovation was a project on coordinating the training of young doctors in the Styria region.
In this project, young doctors were guided through the training period by the coordinator and the responsible doctor holistically. This covered medical training and planning of housing and, for example, childcare. It was built on the needs of the young doctors, was a region wide programme with several hospitals, supported the work-life balance of the future doctors and helped recruiting the young doctors because they had the feeling that they were well looked after.
Their local good practice innovation was a high potential card for nursing students. This form assessed high potential among the nursing students in Speising hospital in Vienna and acted as a method to reward them for doing a good job. High potential students got a VIP card with which they could take part in schooling and events in the hospital. It motivated the students, gave them feedback on their performance and the feeling that they had done an excellent job.
