Gaining insights in partner hospitals: an interview with Jasper Frese

Jasper Frese serves within the Interreg Volunteer Youth (IVY) initiative, a transnational volunteer programme. The 26-year-old man supports the BFCC project at the two partner hospital sites in Lübeck (University Medical Center Schleswig-Holstein) and Tartu (University Tartu). Jasper Frese graduated at the medical school of Riga in spring 2017. After working for the BFCC project, he is planning to specialise in orthopaedics and traumatology.

In which area were you deployed in Tartu?

In Tartu, I was introduced to the IT infrastructure of the hospital and their ways to register complications. I tried to motivate doctors to enter data more diligently and was also given the opportunity to get to know a bit of Estonia’s medical system and their rural hospitals.

What exactly did you do on site?

One of my main activities was introducing the BFCC project to residents and specialists with regard to the upcoming pilot on fracture complication registration and the fracture registry. I talked a lot to the IT department to find out in what form the data is stored in the in-house Hospital Information System eHL. Furthermore, we tested queries to the data bank to see how much we can extract and how suitable the extracts are for the project.

What did you learn?

Mostly I have learned that it is way easier to develop personalised solutions for your IT infrastructure if you have a modern in-house system as in Tartu. Much more uncomfortable is it at the hospital in Lübeck with software from an external provider with underlying code from the 1960s. Accessing data in Tartu is a walk in the park compared to Lübeck. But that is far from anything you could transfer to Lübeck, since the hospital is bigger and more complex.

Digital solutions are generally more common in Estonia. This and the fact that it is a country with a population of a German major city makes it easier to implement innovative IT in the medical sector.

To what extent has your stay in Tartu been relevant to your future activities within the BFCC project?

Just having great ideas is not enough. Important is to get a first-hand insight into the local system. That gives you an idea about the obstacles they face and makes you understand the concerns they bring forward during joint project meetings.