This population-based study comprised 192 mothers and their infants; 58 mothers were smokers and 134 non-smokers. At the 18-month infant check-up at the child health clinic, mothers were questioned about the length of the breast-feeding period, both exclusively breast-feeding and overall breast-feeding time. The numbers of antibiotic-treated respiratory tract infections (RTIs) during the first year of life were noted during a scrutiny of records at the district physician's surgery and child health clinic of the Health Centre, and at the paediatric and ENT departments of the Central Hospital. We were unable to find any connection between the duration of breast-feeding and the number of antibiotic-treated RTIs in the infants. This applied to both exclusively breast-feeding period and overall breast-feeding period. Further, it was shown that infants of smokers were affected by RTIs more often than those of non-smokers, the incidence figures being 1.16 vs. 0.76 antibiotic courses per infant and year, respectively. Moreover, infants of smokers were breast-fed for a shorter period than those of non-smokers, the mean values being 3.3 vs. 4.3 months, respectively, for the period of exclusively breast-feeding, and 5.0 vs. 7.2 months, respectively, for the overall breast-feeding period.
To analyse the impact of implementation and use of eHealth services is fraught with difficulty, and there is often a gap between expected and identified outcomes. In this paper, we identify innovation effects of an eHealth service by applying a framework that focusses on the expected coherent impacts of implementing an IT innovation and contributes to the body of knowledge on tracking innovation effects of services in eHealth. A case study examines four different care units in a government-funded health-care setting. The results show that the effects in the first two contexts of the framework, the micro level and intra-/interorganisational level, could be clearly identified with regard to the physicians and the organisation. However, effects were lacking in the virtual context when looking beyond the involvement of the stakeholders in the eHealth service. The connections between effects for societal groups and larger societal systems simply could not be made in a satisfactory manner.
Keywords: graduate education, systems thinking, holistic approach, complexity, innovation, designerly approach. ApproachWe initially applied this methodology to two courses originally to be given in the autumn and spring semesters of the first year of the Master program: Project in Informatics (PI), and Methods to Evaluate IT Ventures (ME), each granting 7,5 credits in the European Credit Transfer and Accumulation System (ECTS), the European standard used to compare results and performances of higher education students within the European Union.The two courses were refactored and tailored to offer, instead of a plain traditional approach to project management and innovation, a comprehensive overview of the complexity hidden behind the ideation, development and deployment of innovative information systemsbased solutions, and the basis of a practice-oriented holistic methodology the students could use to approach these messy or wicked problems in their future roles as managers or designers.Traditionally, this is not the approach followed within the school, nor it is the approach followed for the teaching of business information systems (BIS) in informatics settings. Courses normally provide step-by-step unambiguous approaches that tend to break down structures through well-ordered, clearly laid out ontologies, hide the complexity and messiness of human decision-making, and do away with their very nature as socio-technical systems. Enterprises, services, and organizations are approached as isolated artifacts or collections of isolated artifacts that can be repurposed or refactored in the void, with little if no systemic consequences, and whose problems can be solved by thoroughly answering a definite set of carefully crafted initial requirements.In their well-known book "Strategic Management of Information Systems" (2009), widely used as supporting material for courses on BIS innovation and in its fifth edition, Pearlson and Saunders for example introduce the Information Systems Strategy Triangle, a synthetic way to describe the interdependency of organizational, information, and business strategies within a company. While it can be argued that the framing is an inward-looking construction that totally neglects the reciprocal influences between a company and its
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