The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality released a set of recommendations last week calling for health IT vendors to focus more of their attention on the needs of consumers in developing electronic health record systems.
Consumers especially need tools to help them manage their health information from multiple sources, including their physicians, insurance plan, public health sources and from devices like blood-glucose monitors, according to the AHRQ report.
"The field of health IT is so dominated by the provider side that the needs of the patient often get lost," according the April 6 report, an analysis of proceedings from a July 20009 AHRQ- workshop on the management of personal health information.
Health IT vendors should gather more research in order to develop software that is most useful to consumers, the proceedings report said. The resulting tools should enable consumers to control access to their personal health information, the report said.
Among the AHRQ recommendations, AHRQ called for a "taxonomy" of categories of consumers and their needs that could be mapped to design strategies for health IT tools.
Measures also need to be established so developers can evaluate system design and usability by different segments of the patient population. Developers may be able to apply methods used in other industries or healthcare areas, such as design and testing for clinical trials.
To encourage consumers to try personal health record systems, developers should experiment with applications common to services and technologies like cable television, mobile phones and social network sites to simply health information access and management.
The full report is available here.
