Abstract
BackgroundEmpowering personal health records (PHRs) provides basic human right, awareness, and intention for health promotion. As health care delivery changes toward patient-centered services, PHRs become an indispensable platform for consumers and providers. Recently, the government introduced “My health bank,” a Web-based electronic medical records (EMRs) repository for consumers. However, it is not yet a PHR. To date, we do not have a platform that can let patients manage their own PHR.ObjectiveThis study creates a vision of a value-added platform for personal health data analysis and manages their health record based on the contents of the "My health bank." This study aimed to examine consumer expectation regarding PHR, using the importance-performance analysis. The purpose of this study was to explore consumer perception regarding this type of a platform: it would try to identify the key success factors and important aspects by using the importance-performance analysis, and give some suggestions for future development based on it.MethodsThis is a cross-sectional study conducted in Taiwan. Web-based invitation to participate in this study was distributed through Facebook. Respondents were asked to watch an introductory movie regarding PHR before filling in the questionnaire. The questionnaire was focused on 2 aspects, including (1) system functions, and (2) system design and security and privacy. The questionnaire would employ 12 and 7 questions respectively. The questionnaire was designed following 5-points Likert scale ranging from 1 (“disagree strongly”) to 5 (“Agree strongly”). Afterwards, the questionnaire data was sorted using IBM SPSS Statistics 21 for descriptive statistics and the importance-performance analysis.ResultsThis research received 350 valid questionnaires. Most respondents were female (219 of 350 participants, 62.6%), 21-30 years old (238 of 350 participants, 68.0%), with a university degree (228 of 350 participants, 65.1%). They were still students (195 out of 350 participants, 56.6%), with a monthly income of less than NT $30,000 (230 of 350 participants, 65.7%), and living in the North Taiwan (236 of 350 participants, 67.4%), with a good self-identified health status (171 of 350 participants, 48.9%). After performing the importance-performance analysis, we found the following: (1) instead of complex functions, people just want to have a platform that can let them integrate and manage their medical visit, health examination, and life behavior records; (2) they do not care whether their PHR is shared with others; and (3) most of the participants think the system security design is not important, but they also do not feel satisfied with the current security design.ConclusionsOverall, the issues receiving the most user attention were the system functions, circulation, integrity, ease of use, and continuity of the PHRs, data security, and privacy protection.
Highlights
The potential for information technology to have an impact on health care safety, cost, and quality has never been greater
Improve the health of the community using aggregated health data for research, public health, emergency preparedness and quality improvement efforts. Realizing these benefits requires an underlying infrastructure that can support the use of patientfocused electronic health information, information that goes beyond the limitations of a specific provider, health plan or delivery system
The building blocks associated with this infrastructure are currently referred to as the electronic medical record (EMR) and/or electronic health record (EHR) for health care professionals, personal health record (PHR) for individuals, and health information exchange (HIE) to tie the infrastructure together
Summary
The potential for information technology to have an impact on health care safety, cost, and quality has never been greater. Improve the health of the community using aggregated health data for research, public health, emergency preparedness and quality improvement efforts Realizing these benefits requires an underlying infrastructure that can support the use of patientfocused electronic health information, information that goes beyond the limitations of a specific provider, health plan or delivery system. Differences in how a term is used can cause confusion and misunderstanding about what is being purchased, considered in proposed legislation, or included in current applicable policies and regulations To address these issues and to provide support for increased adoption of health IT, The Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) issued a contract to reach consensus on definitions for the terms EMR, EHR, PHR, HIE and RHIO. They do represent an important foundation for addressing some important adoption issues
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