I had the opportunity to present to HHS’s American Health Information Community (AHIC) Consumer Empowerment Workgroup about information therapy (Ix) and patient-centered HIT.

Other interesting presentation today included from: Karen Sepucha of IxAction member, the Foundation for Informed Medical Decision Making (and co-author of the most recent IxCenter white paper, who presented on the use of decision aids for shared decision making; and Patti Brennan from the University of Wisconsin and one of the PCHIT Advisory Group members, who presented on the use of PHRs to engage patients and clinicians in healthy choices.

Workgroup members raised several questions following my presentation:

1. How can decision aids be tailored effectively to individual needs?
2. What are the next steps for the IxCenter in advancing Ix initiatives?
3. How important is privacy as a barrier to PHR/patient portal adoption?
4. What can be done to ensure that contextualizing information is incorporated into PHR and related tools?
5. Why did you report that impaired cognitive function was one of the biggest health literacy issues?

I’ll quickly summarize my responses below:

1. We need to maximize the different media we offer for consumers to access patient decision aids so that they best meet consumer needs. An interesting article in this past Sunday’s Washington Post highlights the fact that our opportunities for more powerful communication strategies will continue to explode exponentially.
2. I briefly explained a bit about the IxAction Alliance and our upcoming 7th annual Ix conference, “WIxRED: Next-Generation Patient-Centered Care.” In addition, we are planning some new activities which I will be blogging about shortly.
3. There’s no doubt that privacy issues need to be addressed because many consumers are very concerned about how external parties might use their personal health information. However, I also believe (as I have blogged about before) that the greatest opportunity to overcome privacy concerns is for consumers to actually experience intrinsically meaningful and valuable tools (value from their perspective).
4. Connecting individuals’ personal health information to health content that contextualizes it is the crux of Ix. More to come on this blog in the near future.
5. In my observational experiences in the exam room during the PCHIT Initiative, patients with impaired cognitive function faced the greatest barriers to using Ix. There need to be better hand-offs and standardized systems for building caregivers and others into the transmission and receipt of Ix.

I’ll build on some of these issues and share a few other comments from the AHIC discussion in future posts.

For now, I’d be interested in others input on these questions.

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