Context! What we need is context!

The question of whether data are good, mediocre or bad is not only decided by whether they are valid, correct and complete. As we have read in this issue, it is also a matter of which question is to be answered with the data. In other words, we are talking context. And this not only plays a role in science, but is also highly relevant in a clinic setting. After all, it makes a huge difference whether a ward physician wants to get an overview of the critical patients on the ward or whether she wants to evaluate the development of a specific patient over the last three days. There can be little doubt: the necessary information to answer both questions is available in every hospital these days. The only question is how quickly the required information is available and how comprehensibly it is prepared for the respective user.

The growing increase in knowledge is cursed - not only in medicine, but in all areas of life - by the fact that more information goes hand in hand with more IT systems to manage the information. This paradigm needs to be overcome. However, generating the required contextual information from the mass of available data is one of the greatest challenges facing us. And not only in the healthcare sector. However, here the impact of these efforts is particularly great and affects each and every one of us. Physicians and nurses are under considerable time pressure and, due to the large number of patients, are subject to extreme volumes of context, some of which changes by the minute. In an environment where there are only a few minutes per patient to take a medical history and to perform an assessment, there is no time to gather information manually. However, medical reality is somewhat different. Masses of people are virtually "burnt out" in the world's health systems because they consume so much time to aggregate data for the desired context from a multitude of more or less slow and poorly maintained IT systems using many manual clicks. There is also the threat of erroneous treatment, which can happen to any one of us.

What does this mean for us as manufacturers of IT for the healthcare sector? Yes, we want to build information systems that present information in such a condensed manner that users really do save time. We learn all about contexts and which data must be visible in which context. We learn how to adapt system architectures, structured data layers and contextual presentation concepts so that they can be adapted flexibly on site for the users. Above all, we learn how to design our service concepts in a permanent dialog with the people involved.

Currently, we are in the middle of this process and with each step we ensure that there are more and more good data in the system.