eHealth, Patient-Interaction and Data Quality

eHealth, Patient-Interaction and Data Quality

Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest.  Have you ever heard of these?  Of course you have.  Over the last several years, consumer interaction with computers has soared.  People are now shopping, video chatting, expressing themselves, posting pictures and conducting business using computers, and this is just the tip of the iceberg in terms of how the computer is being used to interact with the world.  And the computer is not the only means.  Using smartphones, the masses can now do all of this on the go, creating a never-ending flow of information.  What is this information made of? Data!

It is only natural that the healthcare industry, now venturing into the IT world, would want to jump on the train to ride the information highway.  With all the human computer interactions going on, and in the lay community, it only makes sense to find a way to have patients interact with their own health data.

Hesse & Shneiderman (2007) wrote the following in the abstract of their article.

“New advances in eHealth are prompting developers to ask “what can people do?” How can eHealth take part in national goals for healthcare reform to empower relationships between healthcare professionals and patients, healthcare teams and families, and hospitals and communities to improve health equitably throughout the population?” (Hesse & Shneiderman, 2007)

The data that is used by patients and providers goes beyond the one-to-one relationship between them.  This is the value that the emerging area of eHealth brings.  The physician is a “microunit” of a larger systems, which includes the care delivery team (nurses, office staff, etc) and the patient is also a “microunit”, surrounded by family & friends, and the community (Hesse & Shneiderman, 2007).

One way that patients can help improve quality of data is by looking up information on their own, and through a provider-sponsored portal (Geissbühler, 2012).  This will help them in “assisting” the provider with pinpointing their issues, while having a reliable source of information. 

Another emerging trend are “patient-controlled health information exchanges” (Geissbühler, 2012).  These are ways that a patient can control access to their health information, federating documents from several providers or organizations and even provide their own contributions (Geissbühler, 2012). 

A third way patients can interface with their health information is by using their “’digital proxy’, a mobile, always-on, permanently connected, and context-aware device such as a smartphone.” (Geissbühler, 2012).  Also homes can be made intelligent, and they can be made aware of the needs of their inhabitants (Geissbühler, 2012). 

Some of this may seem science fiction, but this is the way the health industry is moving.  People are getting more comfortable with sharing information online in the social networking world.  The use of smartphones is proliferating and can be a valuable asset.  All of this information sharing, and allowing patients to control their own data will help to increase data quality on a whole.  This is good not only for the patient, but also for the providers and the communities that the patients live in.

References:

Geissbühler, A.  (2012 June 2012).  eHealth: easing the transition in healthcare.  Swiss Medical Weekly, 142.  doi:10.4414/smw.2012.13599

Hesse, B. W. & Shneiderman, B.  (2007 May).  eHealth research from the user’s perspective.  American Journal of Preventive Medicine, 32(5), pp. S97 – 103.  DOI: 10.1016/j.amepre.2007.01.019