Provider‐sponsored virtual communities for chronic patients: improving health outcomes through organizational patient‐centred knowledge management

Abstract

Patients with long-term chronic disease experience numerous illness patterns and disease trends over time, resulting in different sets of knowledge needs than patients who intermittently seek medical care for acute or short-term problems.

Global Ranking of Management- and Clinical-Centered eHealth Journals

“…It comprises two interacting yet somewhat distinct subareas: one focuses on management IT-related issues and the other concentrates on clinical ones (Oh et al, 2005). The focus on management-related IT issues pertains to topics traditionally studied in information systems (e.g., end user system acceptance), information technology (e.g., system development), electronic commerce/business (e.g., online procurement of products and services), consumer marketing (e.g., online promotion of wellness services), organizational management (e.g., electronically administering employee health benefits) (Mukherjee & McGinnis, 2007), and knowledge management (e.g., implementation of virtual communities of practice) (Winkelman & Choo, 2003). The concentration on clinical-centered issues concerns biomechanical, biomedical, information methods in medicine, health topics, and specialized clinical informatics that involve the use of IT (e.g., the application of IT in digital imaging, primary care, dentistry, pharmaceuticals, and nursing) (Hersh, 2009).…”

Should Health Care Organizations Use Information Gleaned from Organization-Sponsored Patient Support Groups in Strategic Planning?

“…Studies indicate that such online patient forums can serve as a powerful vehicle for (a) knowledge creation and utilization [1,2], (b) disseminating information to the patient community [3], (c) creating new products and services in partnership with patients (i.e., value co-creation) [2], (d) providing empathic support to patients [4], and (e) enhancing the image of the sponsoring organization [5].…”

“…Examples of such active partnership with patients include clinical trials, in which patients are called on to report side effects of certain treatments or drugs, give feedback on new health care services, and so on [2]. The data obtained from these activities in the online forums could then be analyzed and used for making strategic decisions within the organization regarding treatment options, prescription drugs, or developing new patient services [1].…”

eHealth Advances in Support of People with Complex Care Needs: Case Examples from Canada, Scotland and the US

“…eHealth technologies can help to enable personcentred care and support by allowing information to be shared between providers and users of services across care systems (King et al 2012;Winkelman and Choo 2003). The information to be collected could include person-centred data collected through mobile apps and telemonitoring devices; however, most integration efforts in the three cases focus mainly on interoperability between healthcare EMR systems.…”