(Continuing to follow up with commentaries on insights from the 7th Annual Ix Conference…and the slides are not only available now, but they also are right-side-up!)

The day before the Ix conference, the California HealthCare Foundation released the report (“Helping Patients Plug In: Lessons in the Adoption of Online Consumer Tools”) that Ted Eytan and I authored summarizing the Patient-Centered HIT Initiative (funded by CHCF, the United Hospital Fund, Kaiser Permanente, and the Group Health Community Foundation). At the conference, Rachel Block–formerly with UHF and now the Executive Director of the New York eHealth Collaborative–provided an excellent overview of the project with a particular emphasis on our experiences with safety-net populations.

Susannah Fox–Associate Director of the Pew Internet Project and also a member of the PCHIT Advisory Group–responded with a presentation highlighting the digital thermometers she has created with Pew data. They provide a great snapshot of consumer use of Internet/email, cell phones and broadband, broken down by a wide range of demographic characteristics. Susannah has explained that access to electronic technologies is not a matter of a “digital divide” because access is not an “on-off switch” but more of a “dimmer switch.”

A few of her comments beyond the thermometers are worthy of considerable thought as we figure out how to maximize the potential of Ix and patient-centered HIT.

• Susannah notes that 80% of Internet health information seekers turned to a professional in a time of crisis–far greater than any other industry that Pew studies.
• It’s clear that low access does not equate with low interest–a finding that matches exactly what the PCHIT Initiative found.
• To better understand the Internet’s potential for health care, it’s critically important that we talk to those people who are not online as well.
• The world is changing rapidly, so it’s important to (as Susannah paraphrased Diana Forsythe) “design for what could be.”

What do all these findings from Pew and the PCHIT Initiative report mean for next-generation patient-centered care?

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 24th, 2008 at 12:42 pm and is filed under Patient-Centered HIT Initiative, Patient-Clinician Relationship, Safety-Net Populations, The New Health Care Consumer. 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.