Health information use in chronic care cycles

Abstract

A qualitative field study was conducted to explore the use of health information in the chronic care process. The findings show that health information is organized and used based on what we called chronic care cycles -the repeated rotations of a routine medical visit with the subsequent homecare period. We suggest that future system design consider chronic care cycles to facilitate the use of health information in managing chronic diseases.

Sociomateriality & Design

“…In this tradition, research on healthcare focuses on helping out patients and medical professionals by creating technologies that enable their work (Hartswood et al 2002). Such work might focus specifically on facilitating and empowering patients (Andersen 2013), understanding chronic diseases (Chen 2011), or physically challenging patients (Bagalkot and Sokolar 2011;Galliers et al 2012). Compared to technology-centred research, method-centred research also focuses on the designed artefacts, but includes explicit explorations of the practices, techniques, and methods by which artefacts become designed with the participants.…”

Beyond self-monitoring

“…Indeed, care management in peoples' everyday lives is highly context dependent (e.g. their home, activities, specific needs and desires) [1,5,8,9,23,31]. The homesetting is an example of a complex and distributed information space that has been less studied as a place for care in comparison with the clinic [28].…”

“…The homesetting is an example of a complex and distributed information space that has been less studied as a place for care in comparison with the clinic [28]. Also Chen [9] shows the importance of patients' health information use at home and how patients engage in self-management and self-learning activities during chronic care. There is a need to better understand healthcare activities across care settings [28], but also how technology can support homebased care activities and its integration into everyday life [5,32].…”

“…may get involved in everyday care of for example frail, older adults [11,17]. The lack of understanding of homebased care practices where the individual living at home is the expert rather than the healthcare professional [5,8,9] can result in no, or even negative, effects on a person's care management and life.…”

“I don’t bother with the phone!”: Feeling Closer to Physician using Secure Messaging

“…Reference source not found.. In particular for patients who have chronic illnesses or multiple health conditions, health management usually involves repeated interplay of activities taken place in both the clinics and at homes [3]. As a result, frequent communication is often needed between medical visits in order to uphold the quality and continuity of care.…”