We held our third PCHIT Advisory Group meeting today, and had great input from our insightful advisors. Rather than trying to summarize the meeting, I’m focusing on a particular PCHIT-related communication that came up and how it ties into some other recent thinking.

We have been using patient-centered health information technology (PCHIT) since the start of the initiative in part because the focus on personal health records (PHRs) is too narrow. We are interested in all vehicles that help facilitate “patient access to understandable clinical information,” as CHCF’s Veenu Aulakh put it. We also recognize that this phrase may not roll off the tongue, so we need to think creatively about how to communicate it to lay audiences.

Advisory Group member Susannah Fox inspired many concise insights of “seven-word wisdom” at the Health 2.0 conference in San Diego earlier this month. On the IxAction Alliance’s IxInsights webinar yesterday, she, Health 2.0 guru Scott Shreeve, and I each offered up seven-word wisdom related to the intersection of Health 2.0 and information therapy (Ix).

• Fox: “Engage consumers. Practice participatory medicine. Eliminate guesswork.”
• Seidman: “Tailored information. Integrated into care. Every encounter.”
• Shreeve: “Equitable, efficient, effective. Technology enabled reform. Thrive.”

The Advisory Group agrees that communicating what we mean and what we hope to achieve for consumers with the intersection of patient-centered care and HIT will take some creative semantic brainstorming. To get us started, I�ll get the ball rolling building off of Veenu�s PCHIT definition: �Patient access. User-centered design. Clear information.”

Hopefully, my colleagues–and others!–will chime in on how best to communicate what we want to achieve.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 19th, 2008 at 4:24 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.