Page 78 - Health Literacy, eHealth, and Communication: Putting the Consumer First: Workshop Summary

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

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to access the PHR, the ambulance drivers can actually look up informa-
tion as they are driving to the patient’s house. This is very appealing to
patients.
Improvements to the system are always being made. A new version
of the Shared Care Plan was recently launched, for example. While it
appears similar to users, there is a great deal of new technology in place,
including new support for localization (such as language). This version is
being piloted in New Zealand and Sweden, among other places. There is
also a beta version that will enable integration with emerging platforms
such as Microsoft’s HealthVault.
The original version of the Shared Care Plan is available for free to
anyone who wishes to use it. The full source code and complete docu-
mentation of the tool are available at http://www.peacehealth.org/scp.
Anyone can download it. Hundreds of people all over the world have
downloaded the code base and the documentation guide.
One question PeaceHealth staff is currently pondering is how its
patient portal should interact with the Shared Care Plan and other PHRs.
One idea is similar to the concept upon which Quicken (the financial man-
agement software) is based—that is, to try to standardize the systems so
that a patient can interface his or her PHR with multiple organizational
portals where patients may choose to receive services.
Gauthier concluded by saying that there is no shortage of great ideas
from patients that then lead to new designs and built systems. The Shared
Care Plan will keep evolving to incorporate those ideas.

ObSERVATIONS FROM THE ExAM ROOM: PATIENT-CENTERED
HIT IMPLEMENTATION IN DIVERSE PRACTICE SETTINgS
Joshua Seidman, Ph.D., M.H.S.
President, Center for information therapy

Information therapy sits at the intersection of patient-centered care
and health information technology (HIT). The Center for Information
Therapy is an independent nonprofit organization whose mission is to
advance the practice and the science of information therapy in order to
improve people’s health. The vision of the center is a future in which
every health decision is informed. 7
The center uses the logo “Ix” because Ix is a corollary to Rx, the stan-
dard symbol for a medical treatment or prescription. People talk about all
the information that is available on the Web and, in general, it is positive
that consumers have access to that information. But too much information

7 The Center for Information Therapy website is www.ixcenter.org.

Copyright National Academy of Sciences. All rights reserved.