Healthcare

How Can We Assist Patients in Finding and Managing Healthcare Information Over the Internet?

Khaled Hassanein

Background

Healthcare information published on the Internet has had a profound impact on patients’ roles in healthcare systems by empowering them with access knowledge about their conditions and various treatment options. Many consumers in Canada are now turning to the Internet for answers to their health-related questions to compensate for the diminishing amount of time their health care providers can afford to spend with them. Although health information that is published on the Internet can help educate consumers about their conditions and treatments, there is the risk that consumers can erroneously self diagnose and potentially treat themselves based on unreliable information or incomplete interpretations of their conditions. Physicians are concerned with this problem as well as the fact that they are often asked to evaluate and comment on the research presented by their patients, without having the luxury of time to do so during a routine examination. Additionally, patients want to communicate with their physicians about information they have found. When physicians cannot respond to their patient’s questions regarding health information, patients become frustrated and could possibly lose trust in their physician’s advice.

One potential solution to this problem is an integrated e-health information management and communication tool that ensures consistency between the information seen by patients and medical professionals. While there are already scores of health information websites maintained by both public and private initiatives, many have not adequately addressed the problems of ensuring the reliability of the content and synchronizing the knowledge of physicians and patients. The requirements for such an interface require health information retrieval assisted through consumer-physician communication, and controlled access to a patient’s medical records.

Project Description

• This research will examine consumer’s current use and acceptance of Internet based health information and communication tools. This information will be used to develop a model of consumers’ use of e-health information.
• The second stage of this research will encompass the design and development of a prototype integrated health information and communication tool. The consumers’ reaction to this system will be tested at the Human-Computer Interaction laboratory at the School of Business to improve the functionality and usability of this tool.

Potential Benefits to a Sponsoring Organization

The expected benefits of this research will include; a better understanding of the consumers’ use of e-health information, as well as the functional and interface requirements for consumer based e-health systems. By participating in this project, sponsoring organizations will have direct access to the results of our research on e-health interfaces, that will help both businesses and policy makers improve our health care system through a clearer understanding of the problems and solutions at hand.