Students’ competence as eHealth and eWelfare service developers based on the International Medical Informatics Association IMIA’s curriculum structure and design thinking

Abstract

Multidisciplinary cooperation is required to develop digital health and welfare services. The aim of this article is to determine the eHealth and eWelfare service design competences that multidisciplinary students need to be able to develop digital services in health and social care. A secondary aim is to develop a measurement tool based on the International Medical Informatics Association (IMIA) curriculm for future assessment of such competences. Based on basic descriptive statistics results show that most students felt they have good skills in e-communication, basic IT, literature retrieval and research methods; some students, however, reported that they lack these basic skills. It is crucial that instructors be aware of student variations so that they can support the learning of the basics and further the biomedical and health informatics (BMHI) and design thinking (DT) competences. Principal components analysis (PCA) was used to determine the principal components (PC) from measured responses to BMHI and DT sections. Data were collected from 64 students. The components were explored and compared to constructs used to design the original measurement tool. A twenty-component structure showed the simplest solution and explained (80%, 68%, 73%) of variances in BMHI and 83% DT competences, respectively, in the measurement tool, each part of which was analysed by PCA. The PC can be the core areas in different professions taking part in developing eHealth and eWelfare. The parts of measurement tools relied on item reliability and content validity testing. This study provided a base for further measurement tool revision and theoretical testing.