Anthony Faiola

Consumer Health Informatics: Empowering Healthy-Living-Seekers Through mHealth.

People are at risk from noncommunicable diseases (NCD) and poor health habits, with interventions like medications and surgery carrying further risk of adverse effects. This paper addresses ways people are increasingly moving to healthy living medicine (HLM) to mitigate such health threats. HLM-seekers increasingly leverage mobile technologies that enable control of personal health information, collaboration with clinicians/other agents to establish healthy living practices. For example, outcomes from consumer health informatics research include empowering users to take charge of their health through active participation in decision-making about healthcare delivery. Because the success of health technology depends on its alignment/integration with a persons sociotechnical system, we introduce SEIPS 2.0 as a useful conceptual model and analytic tool. SEIPS 2.0 approaches human work (i.e., lifes effortful activities) within the complexity of the design and implementation of mHealth technologies and their potential to emerge as consumer-facing NLM products that support NCDs like diabetes.

Guidelines to Incorporate a Clinician User Experience (UX) into the Design of Patient-Operated mHealth

This interactivity demonstration paper highlights how a patient-operated mHealth solution can be designed to improve clinician understanding of a patients health status during a first face-to-face encounter. Patients can use smartphones to retrieve difficult-to-recall-from memory personal health information. This provides an opportunity to improve patient-clinician collaboration. To explore this idea, a mixed method study with 12 clinicians in a simulated encounter was conducted. A smartphone personal health record was prototyped and used for an experimental study. Communication, efficiency, and effectiveness was improved for clinicians who experienced the prototype. Study outcomes included a validated set of design guidelines for mHealth tools to support better patient-clinician communication.

What Is the Role of Patient Families? An Exploratory Study in a Medical Intensive Care Unit

Patient safety and quality efforts recently began to emphasize patient and family engagement in medical decision making. With measures primarily focused on satisfaction, challenges exist around understanding the impact of engagement on patient outcomes. Research is needed to understand the role of patient/family in safety and quality across clinical environments. The current exploratory study uses observations, ad hoc interviews, and questionnaires to capture the perspective of clinicians and staff on a Medical Intensive Care Unit regarding presence and engagement of families in patient care. Findings suggest that reported roles go beyond emotional support and further investigation is needed to explore the role of families in patient care from the safety and quality perspective.

Supporting Patient Healing through ICUsmartCARE: Technologies that Enable Family Collaboration, Presence, and Information Flow

Research suggests that family members of ICU patients have not been meaningfully engaged in the care process, putting them at risk for experiencing fear, depression, stress, and disruptions of family relationships. To address this problem, we propose the design of a family-centered communication-information technology, ICUsmartCARE. Its purpose is to support collaboration by providing families increased (remote) access, presence, and interaction with the patient and patient data-without placing additional information-sharing burden on critical care clinicians. The approach will be novel in three ways: (1) Family-centered framework approach to accessing real-time bedside patient data and synchronized-video, (2) Mobile-health support for family-patient-clinician collaboration--using two integrated (and validated) technologies (CISCO Jabber Guest and Medical Information Visualization Assistant), and (3) Cognitive systems engineering methodology to conduct family-centered data collection/analysis, interaction design, and testing of the socio-technical system. The commercial potential of ICUsmartCARE is considerable in supporting effective and efficient ICU family-centered care.