Page 73 - 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

FIguRE 4-2 Task.
SOURCE: Gauthier, 2008.
Figure 4-2, bitmapped
Another task was to allow the patient to find the name of a medica-
tion he or she took in the past because it was effective and he or she would
like to take it again. Amazingly, many patient records and medication
lists are structured so that only active medications are shown. Yet there
are a number of valid and legitimate reasons that patients might need
to access their discontinued medication lists, so the project designed a
discontinued-medication section in the Shared Care Plan. The system is
designed so that it does not require the patient to do any work to maintain
the list. The patient simply takes a medication off the active-medication
list and, unless the patient states that the removal was entered in error,
the medication will automatically be put onto the patient’s discontinued
medication list.
Another task that patients are often faced with is to quickly communi-
cate their health information to a new doctor. As in the case of MiVIA dis-
cussed earlier, the wallet-sized card provided with the Shared Care Plan
is valued by both patients and their health care professionals. The card
provides a concise summary of some of the most pertinent information in
the personal health record and can be easily printed. If one were to print
the entire Shared Care Plan, by contrast, it could be 15 to 20 pages long.
Since one of the goals of the Shared Care Plan is to enable patients to
communicate with their health care professionals, and because health care
professionals were logging into the system, it became necessary to sup-
port clinician tasks in addition to patient tasks. For example, a clinician

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