Assessing Commercially Available Personal Health Records for Home Health: Recommendations for Design

Health information exchange in relation to point-of-care testing in home care: Issues in Japan

BACKGROUND

Laboratory tests, especially point-of-care testing (POCT), and related health information exchange (HIE) are necessary for patient management in the home care setting, where clinic-hospital cooperation and interprofessional collaboration are important.

METHODS

We raised the issues ahead of HIE in relation to POCT in home care in Japan, including issues in electronic medical record use, localized interprofessional collaboration networks with information and communication technology, personal health record use and open connectivity.

RESULTS

HIE system may depend on the initiatives of expert communities with non-expert partnership, as well as national healthcare policies.

CONCLUSION

We promote future challenges in this growing area.

Patient generated health data use in clinical practice: A systematic review

BACKGROUND

Precision health calls for collecting and analyzing large amounts of data to capture an individual's unique behavior, lifestyle, genetics, and environmental context. The diffusion of digital tools has led to a significant growth of patient generated health data (PGHD), defined as health-related data created, gathered or inferred by or from patients and for which the patient controls data collection and data sharing.

PURPOSE

We assessed the current evidence of the impact of PGHD use in clinical practice and provide recommendations for the formal integration of PGHD in clinical care.

METHODS

We searched PubMed, Ovid, Embase, CINAHL, Web of Science, and Scopus up to May 2018. Inclusion criteria were applied and four reviewers screened titles and abstracts and consequently full articles.

FINDINGS

Our systematic literature review identified 21 studies that examined the use of PGHD in clinical settings. Integration of PGHD into electronic records was extremely limited, and decision support capabilities were for the most part basic.

DISCUSSION

PGHD and other types of patient-reported data will be part of the health care system narrative and we must continue efforts to understand its impact on health outcomes, costs, and patient satisfaction. Nursing scientists need to lead the process of defining the role of PGHD in the era of precision health.

Using scenarios and personas to enhance the effectiveness of heuristic usability evaluations for older adults and their care team

OBJECTIVE

Using heuristics to evaluate user experience is a common methodology for human-computer interaction studies. One challenge of this method is the inability to tailor results towards specific end-user needs. This manuscript reports on a method that uses validated scenarios and personas of older adults and care team members to enhance heuristics evaluations of the usability of commercially available personal health records for homebound older adults.

MATERIALS AND METHODS

Our work extends the Chisnell and Redish heuristic evaluation methodology by using a protocol that relies on multiple expert reviews of each system. It further standardizes the heuristic evaluation process through the incorporation of task-based scenarios.

RESULTS

We were able to use the modified version of the Chisnell and Redish heuristic evaluation methodology to identify potential usability challenges of two commercially available personal health record systems. This allowed us to: (1) identify potential usability challenges for specific types of users, (2) describe improvements that would be valuable to all end-users of the system, and (3) better understand how the interactions of different users may vary within a single personal health record.

CONCLUSIONS

The methodology described in this paper may help designers of consumer health information technology tools, such as personal health records, understand the needs of diverse end-user populations. Such methods may be particularly helpful when designing systems for populations that are difficult to recruit for end-user evaluations through traditional methods.