Page 59 - Health Literacy, eHealth, and Communication: Putting the Consumer First: Workshop Summary

Health Literacy, eHealth, and Communication: Putting the Consumer First: Workshop Summary

HeALtH LiteRACY, eHeALtH, AnD CoMMUniCAtion

option. The ACSI data show that the most desired options for online ser-
vice now are appointment view followed by appointment scheduling. In
response, with the secure messaging initiative, VA is building templates
to make it very easy for patients to request appointments online. Other
services of importance are the ability to engage in secure messaging and
the ability to communicate electronically with patients’ clinicians.
Because veterans know about the pilot project, it is important for VA
to move quickly to make these features available in the national program.
While the technology is fairly easy, it takes time to build the business
process and the organizational framework at all the sites. For that reason,
VA has taken an incremental approach aimed at ensuring that each step
is done correctly before moving to the next service.
One participant asked if those who enrolled in the VA Track Health
had better health outcomes on average than the members of the VA
population who did not enroll. Nazi responded that this is an important
research question. Because VA has a research branch, those involved in
informatics at VA are pressing for a collaborative effort with VA research-
ers to study such questions as: Do personal health records make a dif-
ference? Do users have better health outcomes? Are they more highly
satisfied?
Some research questions are quite complex, such as looking at clini-
cal outcomes over time, but there is a great deal of interest in pursuing
questions about eHealth. VA is poised to create a research summit to help
develop policy frameworks for how research is to be carried out. The
personal health record is a new frontier and requires a multidisciplinary
stakeholder approach to make sure the infrastructure is in place to sup-
port the research.
One audience member noted that Nazi said the VA would like, ulti-
mately, to give patients access to progress notes and clinical information.
Is that information going to be transformed in a way that makes it easily
understandable? When one thinks about medical progress notes and how
cryptic they might be, will there be an intermediate step to translate the
information into something more useful to patients?
Nazi responded that, in the pilot, there has been a narrow focus on
answering whether this could be done in a secure way, and if it is done,
will patients find it to be of value. From the pilot responses, the answer is
yes, although one particular piece that translated clinical reminders into
patient-friendly wellness reminders appears to be most easily understood
by patients. In terms of the broader question, one of the advantages of
building the system incrementally is that one can spend time focused
on the different pieces. At present, VA is conducting a field test of offer-
ing laboratory test results in order to obtain feedback on the system. In
some cases it is not possible to change the readability of the material.

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